The Red Queen (115 page)

‘I could hardly believe it when I realised he had come wi’ ye,’ Matthew grinned. ‘I canna wait to see him after all this time!’ Matthew said that the others had elected to remain where they were for the moment, because Gavyn and Rasial had gone wandering and they wanted to wait for their return.

We were now making our way along the side of the island that was not visible from the shore and I saw that there was more of the palace standing than I had thought. What I had taken for a creeper-covered mound was, from this side, a wall and part of what had once been a walkway. This must be the garden of the palace.

‘The queen says that there was once a system of pipes that brought water up from a subterranean lake, nae just here but throughout th’ whole city, but th’ art of workin’ yon mechanisms that drove them is lost lang ago,’ Matthew said.

Somewhere within the settlement there was a distant muffled crash.

‘I thought I heard an explosion before,’ I said. ‘What is that?’

‘There is some fightin’ gannin’ on,’ Matthew said. ‘At least, some of th’ Chafiri compounds in th’ south have weapons, courtesy of th’ emissary. Fortunately nothing very forceful, as it transpires.’

‘It seems impossible that so much happened while I slept,’ I said. ‘The whole battle for the Red Land feels like a dream to me.’

He laughed. ‘It sounds very grand when ye call it a battle but it were nowt as immense or bloody as th’ rebel battle to wrest control of th’ Land from th’ Council an’ th’ Herder Faction, I hear. Essentially Redport is one immense city an’ we had a good long while to figure out an’ perfect plans over th’ years. They only wanted th’ queen to come. Though in the end she is not inclined to fit into anyone’s plans.’ There was pride in his voice, and for a thrilling moment, I saw Dragon in his mind, riding into the city on Gahltha and coercing her dragon. Truly she looked magnificent, even allowing for Matthew’s romantic embroidery.

We reached the end of the path where there was an entrance to what must once have been a long and lovely pavilion, sunken into the earth. Again this was not visible from the mainland. Matthew stopped and made a little flourish. ‘Here is the parlour of the Red Queen.’

I went through the broken doorway. The roof of the pavilion was gone, but most of the pillars that would have supported it remained standing, though they were entwined with creepers. The floor was an exquisite gold and green mosaic and at one end was a dais flooded with morning sunlight. Sitting on the edge of it was Dragon, talking with Rymer, Maginder and the big slavewoman with the yellow-tipped hair, whom I had seen brushing Gilaine’s hair in a dream.

As we came towards them, I saw that Dragon was wearing simple loose green trews and a sleeveless vest worked in ship fish and her feet were bare. Her hair was loose, a shining red-gold flag of brightness tousled by the salt-scented breeze flowing in from the sea. She had never looked more beautiful, and I could not help glancing at Matthew, but his expression was open and calmly purposeful.

Dragon noticed us and turned.

‘My queen, here is Elspeth Gordie,’ Matthew said with a formality that startled me.

‘Elspeth.’ Dragon ran lightly across the mosaic floor and threw her arms around me. I embraced her for a long warm moment, thinking how small she was to be a queen. Yet it seemed to me that there was something new in her face when she looked up at me. ‘I am so sorry I left you in the Great Hall. I was so afraid for you when my Redlanders told me that you had been taken away by Ariel. Yet now here you are, and we have taken Redport. Most of it anyway.’

‘You have done well, Queen Dragon.’

She laughed. ‘My subjects are insisting on calling me that, which leaves me nameless, but perhaps a queen does not need a name.’ Her gaze shifted to Matthew and she thanked him courteously for bringing me so promptly. There was none of the highhandedness that Swallow had described, but just the same, they were not at all natural with one another. Dragon had already turned back to the Redlanders, suggesting they go with Matthew and he would explain what had been happening in the harbour. He bowed and ushered them out.

When we were alone, Dragon gave me a slightly shamefaced look. ‘Matthew inspired my people. He forced them to believe that I would come and he planned this uprising. I have no doubt that without him, many would have died needlessly today. Instead there have been few deaths or injuries. I ought to be grateful. I
am
grateful. But he has been so very formal and reverent with me, insisting on pledging to serve me and calling me “my queen” every other minute. He even kneeled to me when I came to get him out of the tidal cell! It makes me want to bite him.’ Her eyes flashed and for a moment she looked very much the feral child I had found in the ruins in the Westland.

‘I told you that he was ashamed of how he treated you when you were in the Land and no doubt he fears that you may think he treats you differently now because he learned that you are a queen.’

‘He
does
treat me differently because I am queen!’ she cried.

I wanted to say something soothing, but as ever, talk of emotions discomforted me. And what would I say in any case? I thought Matthew
had
come to love Dragon, but he had not seen her for years and they had both grown up, so who was it that he loved? A creature of his imagination, knowing Matthew. And what did Dragon want? One minute she was high-handed and cold and withdrawn and the next she was wanting Matthew to be natural with her. But she was also conscious that she was a queen and his queen.

Suddenly I understood exactly why human emotions so confounded and irritated Maruman’s sensibilities. ‘Have you seen Maruman?’

‘Matthew told me he was with Dameon when they talked.’ Her face changed. ‘But I must show you Luthen’s crypt! Maruman said it was terribly important that you see it, for the sake of your quest.‘

‘Is it nearby?’ I asked, my heart beginning to gallop.

‘It is here.’ She look my arm and led me across the mosaics to a stairwell going down into the earth. ‘Maruman made me hide and sleep down there, and then he took me on the dreamtrails, and the palace was still standing and my mother was there, waiting for us. She showed me the trick of getting into the crypt and she told me our sceptre is there. She said I would need it to wield my true power as a queen.’ Dragon gave me a wicked, delighted smile, adding slyly, ‘She never knew I would not need the sceptre to raise a dragon.’

Dragon pressed her fingers into a groove in the short, broken wall that formed a dead end at the bottom of the stairwell, and pushed. The wall opened like a door to reveal more stone steps going down.

‘Twelve steps,’ she said as she preceded me into the darkness. ‘There are more, but they don’t go anywhere but to a collapsed cellar. We stop at twelve. It’s funny, I was sure my mother never brought me here in life, but since coming here the first time, I can remember her counting to twelve and I think she
did
bring me, just the once. I was very young and half asleep on her shoulder. She probably thought I would not remember, and I didn’t. And then I did. I remember I asked her why no one else was coming with us. There were always people following her around in the palace, but here we were alone. She said that no one was allowed to come here except a Red Queen. I said
I
wasn’t a Red Queen and she said that I would be some day, and so it was the same thing. Then she said that only one other person was allowed to come here, and that was the person who would find the treasure hidden here for them to find. I think she meant the sceptre and maybe you, because you will be able to find it.’

She gave me such a child’s look of expectant hopefulness that it ached me ‘What does the sceptre look like, then?’ I asked.

Dragon knitted her brows. ‘I can show you. I don’t remember much about the crypt and it was very dark when I was in there with Maruman. He seemed to think I would be able to see and it made him cross that I couldn’t. I remembered being frightened when I came with my mother, because it was so dark. She lifted me up so that I could see the top of the Red Queen’s sepulchre; she was buried there, too, when she died. There was a carving of her lying asleep. The sceptre is carved on it beside her.’

Dragon had reached the twelfth crumbling step. She waited until I had got to the step above her then she turned to the wall and pushed on it until it opened to reveal a passage. She stepped into it, carefully lowering her head and warning me to do the same.

‘It is very awkward but it is only a few steps long,’ she said.

Bent over, she set off along a passage that almost immediately concluded in a wall. Removing from her pocket one of the lightballs the emissary had handed out, she squeezed it and the soft golden light it shed revealed a carving of a ferocious dragon. As far as I could see, it was the same dragon picked out in tesserae in the Infinity of Dragonstraat, and the same terrifying creature that I had seen Dragon summon up in Matthew’s memories.

It was also the same form her spirit had taken when she had sunk into a coma.

I said as much to Dragon, who nodded and said she thought the crypt might be the origin of her coerced dragons. ‘The night my mother carried me here, the light from her lantern showed this, and I thought it was real. That memory is like a fever dream.’ Her voice was distracted as she studied the carving, but suddenly she reached out decisively and pressed her fingers to several scales on its hide. With her free hand, she pushed at the wall and it swung open to reveal a chamber that appeared to contain nothing but a single sepulchre. The roof was level with that of the passage, but the floor of the chamber was a good bit lower, and there were steps leading down into it. I followed Dragon down them and thought it no surprise that she had been frightened of the place. Doubtless the strength of her fears had fed her dragonish visions, giving them full emotional impact.

I glanced around, noting the walls were carved in panels showing many kinds of beasts and birds and fish, and that they bore an unsettling resemblance to those panels Cassandra had carved and which had come to be incorporated in the first doors to Obernewtyn. The door panels had contained all of the clues that would lead me to the things Cassandra and Hannah had left to help me disable Sentinel, and I wondered if these panels might not contain the final instructions I would need to find Sentinel and complete my quest.

Moving closer to examine them I felt sure Cassy had not carved the panels. For some reason, this made me wonder yet again why, coming to the Red Land as they had, Hannah and Cassy had not then made it their business to locate and destroy Sentinel. They must have known it was in this land, and how much simpler for them to do what was needful. That they had not done so could only mean there was something they had lacked. After my most recent Beforetime dream, I felt sure it was connected to the period in Cassy’s life after she had allowed Gadfian pirates to take her from the Land and before her rescue by the Sadorians, as an older woman. That was the one period of her life about which I had never dreamed, but it was after it that she set up the small computermachine in the amethyst chamber in the Sadorian Earthtemple, which powered it just long enough for me to get the message she had left in it for me, and to put my voice and Maruman’s into the memory seed. Perhaps she had got those things wherever she had gone after she was taken from the Land.

‘Have you found anything?’ Dragon asked.

I realised I had been standing for some time lost in thought, but now I shook my head and asked her to show me the carving of the sceptre. She led me to the sepulchre and pointed to the top of it where the first Red Queen had been carved lying in endless sleep. ‘The Red Queen lies here who was Luthen’s sister,’ Dragon whispered, going to the sepulchre and laying a hand on the carved sceptre that lay alongside the sleeping form. It was a long thin rod with an ornate coil at the top that was shaped like a seashell, or maybe it was a seashell, and carved knobs that on the real thing might be shells or precious stones.

‘I have pressed every bit of this carving and on every bit of the wall carvings, but nothing moves and I can find no rims or cracks that might show there was a secret niche. The only thing I can think of is that the sceptre is buried under the floor.’

‘Hard to imagine two women digging up this hard earth, one of them pregnant, but I suppose they might have had help. Not Luthen of course, since this was his memorial crypt, but some of the Beforetime Misfits that travelled with them. But your mother called it a hidden treasure, didn’t she? Not a buried treasure. Perhaps . . .’ I glanced at the other end of the crypt and caught sight of the very stiff and stylised carving of a man.

‘Luthen,’ Dragon said. ‘I pressed everything on that, too.’

I bade her bring the light closer and she did, asking eagerly, ‘Do you see something?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I murmured. I ran my fingers along a shallow slot-like groove between the fingers of the carved man. There was no hidden knob yet it suddenly struck me that the fingers were shaped to hold something. I went nearer to examine the awkwardly clasped hands. ‘Here,’ I muttered. ‘I thing the hand is meant to be holding something. Something has been removed.’

‘The sceptre!’ Dragon said.

I went back to examine the sceptre carved on the top of the sepulchre and then returned to the flatly carved man. There was nothing of the dominant vivid personality that showed itself in the statue I had seen outside Saithwold. ‘No. The shape is wrong. Whatever went here is big and wide. Heavy too, if it is stone like the wall. I ran my fingers long the groove again and this time noticed some small indentations around the edges. ‘This must be . . .’ I stopped and sucked in a breath. ‘
I know what it was.
A stone sword!’

‘A sword?’ Dragon asked, sounding bewildered, and it struck me that I might never have shown the stone sword to her.

‘Dragon, in the Earthtemple in Sador I was given a stone sword and bidden to keep it with me until I was able to return it to its rightful owner. I could never understand what use a stone sword could be, but the overguardian called it a stone key.’