The Hollow Queen (5 page)

Already he had begun to suspect that the furor for revenge was beginning to wane in several of the other guildsmen. While in life Esten had their love and loyalty without question, the cost of his crusade to bring her murderers to tribal justice was adding up to a ledger that was hard to balance.

But that was because none of them had seen her as he had when he had first become aware of her.

Dranth, who was old enough to have been her father, potentially her grandfather, had first come upon the little murderous prodigy in a back alley in Yarim when she was only eight years old. He had seen her first from behind, her dark, ragged hair bouncing across her shoulders as she systematically removed the organs of a soldier who had fallen asleep, drunk, between the taverns he had been frequenting earlier that night. She managed to eviscerate him so quickly, so cleanly, that Dranth had stood frozen in nothing less than awe at the sight.

Then, when she was finished, she wiped her nose with her sleeve and turned to see him watching her.

And smiled.

That smile, glittering teeth below eyes as dark as the night sky within a face framed by matching hair, had caused him to silently swear his soul into alien slavery, to vow to protect and promote her for the rest of his life.

Never even imagining that hers would end so soon, before his.

She was the only person he had ever loved.

He had never tired of doing anything Esten needed, unquestioningly answering every demand, undertaking any job, even willingly allowing her to deflower herself upon him at the age of eleven, something that even he found mentally abhorrent but physically irresistible. The image of her young face, still missing some of the adult teeth, staring down from atop him, carefully watching his reaction, was burned uncomfortably into his memory, and it returned now, her eyes narrow in observation, sparkling as she forced him into fondling her in ways she knew made him uncomfortable.

Even in his sleep, acid rose in his throat at the memory of her insistently putting his hand on her prepubescent nipple, a place that a breast one day would be, guiding him in techniques of stimulation she should never have known so soon. He knew that her physical immaturity could not be allowing her any sexual satisfaction at the things she was making him do. He knew exactly why she demanded them of him.

Because
they made him uncomfortable.

She had even told him so.

He had taught her what she wanted to learn, how to use her body to entice and control men, and in turn, she had used that knowledge as a weapon of impressive potency to gain her what she wanted, when her other weapons—a brilliant, quick mind, savage beauty, deadly aim with a blade, and the complete and utter lack of a soul—were insufficient.

Avenge me.

Suddenly, as a chill night wind swept under the bush, dropping thorns on his face, Dranth woke and sat up carefully, shivering.

Returning to Talquist, having failed, was one of the riskier things he had ever undertaken.

But at least he felt he had the winning card in his pocket not only to survive, but to gain another chance at killing the Bolg king, the man who had taken Esten from him.

And, more specifically, the giant Sergeant-Major who had done the actual killing.

He passed a thin hand over the hollows of his bald head at the memory of the voice of the woman in the meadow where the assassination attempt had gone wrong, the woman who had been the target of the initial paralytic.

Whom they had planned to take, along with her infant child, to the emperor of Sorbold, after killing the men they sought.

Meridion, shhhh, now. Shhhh.

Meridion.

He had the name.

The name Talquist craved above all other pieces of information.

Dranth reached over and shook the snoring Yabrith awake.

“Get up. We are almost there.”

“It's not dawn yet,” Yabrith muttered, yawning widely and farting loudly.

“All the better,” Dranth said, slinging his pack to his shoulder. “A few more hours of darkness will serve to get us all that much further to Jierna Tal. Let's go.”

 

6

BENEATH THE WAVES OF THE WIDE CENTRAL SEA

Ashe could feel the sun on his face long before he deigned to open his eyes to it.

The water around him was lightening to a hazy green as morning came to the world above, a world with no boundaries or landmarks, nothing to break the endlessness of the sea.

He had been traveling for less than a sennight. This was the fifth sunrise he had experienced since leaving the dry world; it was now bringing the watery realm to wakefulness again. A nominal amount of sleep was still necessary to sustain his consciousness, but it was only enough to rest his mind a little, and did not interfere with his progress into the depths.

The first two days had been a disturbing confirmation of everything he knew from scouting reports on the coastline blockade. The waters north of Avonderre Harbor where he had waded into the sea were clogged with debris and bits of broken ships, caught in the current and floating in the waves, even now, weeks after the assault and raid from the air that had destroyed one of the greatest and busiest ports in the Known World. Talquist's forces had managed to eradicate in a relatively few hours what had taken centuries to build.

The sunlit realm of the first hundred or so fathoms of depth, the part of the sea in which vision was still useful, was full of fish this morning. He had passed through them in his sleep; now, awake and conscious as he had become with the morning light, he was aware of the song of a large cetacean, a whale in all likelihood, somewhere nearby. Ashe knew his wakefulness had made him more corporeal than he was in his sleep, and he hovered in the drift, waiting for it to pass, along with the swirling schools of its prey.

As the huge creature's wake rumbled through him, he thought back to the time less than a year before when he had met his most illustrious ancestor not very far from this place in the sea, back on the same cliffs that towered above where he had entered the water.

In his search for Rhapsody when she had been captured by the demon known as Michael, the Wind of Death, he had come upon MacQuieth Monodiere Nagall, his mother's ancient forebear and hero of the Seren War two thousand years before. In the sight of history and the whole of the world, MacQuieth was believed long dead, but Ashe had learned some time before that reports of the deaths of ancient Cymrians were occasionally overrated. And while he had witnessed the hero's actual demise, had been told that his heartbeat, which Achmed the Snake, a man who could track such things from the old world, had said rang like a great bell, even below the waves, was now silent, there was more than enough memory in the sea, especially those places near where the great man had lived, that carried his essence, even now.

The longer he spent, vaporous and formless, beneath the waves, the harder it became to fend off strong memories that would creep over him in the quiet depths.

The most difficult ones were memories of loss: the death of his father, Llauron ap Gwylliam, a complicated man with a painful past, but who had risen above it in later years to be a steady religious leader and caring, if somewhat manipulative, father.

He had regretted more than anything his rejection of Llauron, his unkind, brusque refusal to allow his father the one thing in the world Llauron craved once he had forsworn his humanity and become, like his great-grandmother Elynsynos, a dragon in elemental form.

The simple knowledge that he would be allowed to know his grandchild.

That unkindness to the man who had taught him everything he knew about forestry and the wilderness, who had floated him in the tides as an infant, taught him to swim in them as a child and had taken him to the sea as a youth, had engendered in him a love of the earth, taught him the lore of places that were natural and the cradle of history ate at him now as he walked the sea, formless in it, as his father had once held him in his earliest memory.

Perhaps one day I will understand what it truly means to be a father,
he thought as he passed through the wreckage of ships, the burning barrels of magnesium and pitch, the body parts that had still not been consumed by fish and other creatures of the Deep.

All he knew was that the child who had been secreted away for his own protection, the infant his wife had carried in pain and love, had pled with him to have, was now so deep a part of his soul that he could not imagine the possibility of taking a single breath more if he were not able to reclaim him, to protect him and keep him safe from a world that threatened him.

It was too much to contemplate and still remain sane.

Ashe let the thoughts flow out of his amorphous mind, concentrating instead on one thing, and one thing only.

The White Ivory tower of the Sea Mages in Gaematria, the mystical island wrapped in fog and secrets, to which he was traveling.

The Isle of the Sea Mages was a place of scholarship and mystery, where many beings of elder races like the Ancient Seren, the Liringlas, the Gwenen, and the Gwadd had chosen to make their home when the Second Fleet of the Cymrian exodus had been sundered at the Prime Meridian by a great storm in their passage from the old world. Magic was studied as a science there, and his uncle, Edwyn Griffyth, served as High Sea Mage, lending his brilliance in the areas of engineering and smithery to the knowledge that was said to be hoarded as treasure there.

He had beheld the legendary tower on both of his previous trips to the Isle, and had been so clearly impressed by its power, its height, and the reverence with which it was spoken of by the Sea Mages and anyone who came to Gaematria. Ashe knew that if any instrumentality, any tool was capable of seeing beyond the nefariously deep magic that was obscuring an oceanwide blockade, a naval undertaking that had allowed the pretender to the throne of Sorbold to all but shut down sea trade around the world, it was the tower.

Ashe cleared his mind, fixing his vision on the image of it, and pressed on, formless in the waves of the ocean.

 

7

PALACE OF JIERNA TAL, JIERNA'SID, SORBOLD

Talquist Rev-Penthor, the recently crowned Emperor of the Sun in the desert realm of Sorbold, lingered on the top step and allowed himself one quick look from the inspiring heights of his beloved tower that faced southwest out of the palace of Jierna Tal before turning to address the entity that had arrived just moments before him.

Given that entity's power and genesis, it was impossible not to be at least a little intimidated.

“Good morning, Faron.”

Talquist took a moment to catch his breath. The stairs to the tower room were steep, and the emperor was still recovering from the night before, which had been especially fine. As the borders of the empire continued to expand, the bedwenches supplied to him were growing in appeal, a fine variety of the most exceptional and beautiful captives from exotic places on the shipping routes and across the continent. Additionally, the captured liquid stock of the distilleries of Canderre and Argaut was even more plentiful, leading to more and more regular overindulgence of a different sort. And the successful fulfillment of his plans was giving him copious reason to celebrate.

Paying the price each following morning in the coin of headaches, mild nausea, and light sensitivity.

A minuscule price to pay,
he thought as he stepped more fully into the room.

Good morning, Majesty.
The shrill voice made Talquist's head feel as if it were about to cave in.
You smell of the horse that apparently shat on you as you slept beneath it.

Talquist suppressed a belch. “Interesting that a stone nose is capable of smelling horse shit,” he said as pleasantly as he could. “I believe this is a new development. I'm glad to see that you are evolving and becoming more and more—er—sophisticated each day.”

He walked over to the massive map of the Known World inlaid in countless types of wood and displayed on the wall next to the window, the shipping lanes detailed in extraordinary accuracy. The sting of the wind through the aperture was dry and sandy, the fragrance of this desert land. For just a moment Talquist missed the tang of the sea wind he had been dreaming about a few moments before. He examined the map.