The Red Queen (81 page)

It was a little firelizard slithering from one rift to another, freezing briefly at the edge to flick out its tongue before it vanished. It was the first life I had seen in the Red Land other than the herd of creatures we had seen bounding though the light of the glide, and it made me wonder what else dwelt here unseen. Then I thought of the subterranean road Rasial had mentioned, wondering if I was right about the wolves using it to follow us. It must be yet another remnant of the Beforetime, of course, but since this land was not tainted, then nothing had been destroyed and so it was now as it had been in the Beforetime. Perhaps the road simply led to Redport. But from where, and why not simply have it run over the surface of the land? Or was it another example of the Beforetimers’ mania for building things under the ground?

Wearying of my thoughts chasing one another around, and certain any minute that Maruman would wake and accuse me of gnawing, I rose and crawled out from under the awning into the dry heat. I felt impatient for the others to wake now that the sun was near to setting, yet it was still very hot. Squinting my eyes against the brightness, I could see the horses, grazing in the far distance, shimmering a little in the heat rising from the baked red earth.

I farsent them to be sure that Darga was with them and Rasial as well, for neither dog was in sight and Gavyn lay fast asleep under the awning, the owl perched on his hip. Its eyes were closed fast but the boy’s eyelids were flickering and I wondered what he was dreaming about. And how was it with the dog, now that Gavyn slept and he woke?

‘Adantar and the bird fly the dreamtrails with Mornirdragon,’ Maruman sent, without opening his eyes. He was curled up in Dragon’s glorious tumble of red and gold curls, as was his wont, and I found that I envied them both as I returned to the shade to check the water-making device. I was aware of a growing urgency to get on with my quest, and feared it would turn into a premonition, though maybe, this close to the final clue, it was no more than that I could not approach it at a calm walk; I must run.

In the end it was another full day and night, the last hour travelling up a long gradual slope before we came unexpectedly to the end of it. It was dawn, so the ruddy light flowed over us and across the land. We were standing on the shadowy edge of a long escarpment that seemed to have been caused by a vast subsidence of earth running all the way to the coast. It ran away out of sight to the south, but to the west I could just make out that it curved around in an enormous arc towards the coast. It was like the rim of an huge flat-bottomed bowl, and we were on one edge looking across to another.

I could not see any settlement, but Swallow said he could see a cluster of buildings at the edge of the land a little to the north, with two high towers rising above the rest standing close together somewhere about the centre.

‘I wonder what happened here,’ Dameon murmured, after I had explained the terrain.

‘Whatever it is, it happened a good long while ago,’ Ana said, pointing out a flat black lichen and some small wiry plants growing over the broken ground. ‘That lichen would have taken years to grow.’

It took us a while to pick our way down the crumbling edge of the subsidence to the sunken plain, for though it was not more than the height of a three-storey building, the ground was broken and difficult to negotiate, especially for the horses. By the time we reached the bottom, it was approaching midday, but none of us was ready to stop with our goal in sight.

I attempted to farseek it passively but still my mind could not get past the haze of interference. It was possible the sea had produced it, for I could not differentiate it from the interference produced by the sea, but it was also possible that the whole coastline was washed by tainted seas, despite what Hendon had said, for he had never been here and was only either repeating what God had said, or extrapolating from that information.

Turning back to look up at the sloping broken ground we had just descended, I wondered at a disturbance so violent that it could cause such an enormous expanse of land to sink. If the Red Land was not tainted, the subsidence might be the result of some natural event, but even that could have occurred because of the Beforetimers’ activities. Garth and the teknoguilders had said there had been many incidences in the Beforetime of violent upheavals in land and sea and changes in the seasons that were the result of the accumulating damage done by the Beforetimers.

Belatedly it occurred to me that Eden might very well have been exactly where God had sent the glide, only it had been swallowed by the same upheaval that had caused the subsidence. The subterranean road taken by the beasts might easily have run between it and the coast. It was a pity the thought had not occurred to me earlier or I might have asked Hendon to see if he could spot any trace of the ruins in the rift while he was trying to get to the glide. But perhaps, in the end, I would not need to find Eden to locate Sentinel, now that we were making our way to Redport.

We set off towards the buildings Swallow alone could see, though now he said he could only clearly see the two scrapers that rose up from the settlement. They had been absent from Fey’s vision, so I could not picture them. Having overflown them, Fey might not even have noticed they were a good deal higher than the other buildings. Dragon confirmed that there were two high towers in Redport, which stood either end of something she called the Infinity of Dragonstraat. She did not know why they were so much higher than the other buildings, but she said they were sacred to the Redlanders, and that her mother had especially revered them, because they confirmed her power. She did not know how or why, save that it had some connection to her mother’s sceptre.

Dameon broke in to ask what an infinity was, and Dragon’s description made me realise she was speaking of the linked circular plazas I had seen, one in each segment of the settlement. She said the Infinity of Dragonstraat was the largest of the infinities, which meant it was the central infinity I had seen in Fey’s vision, which allowed me to locate the towers, even if I had never seen them. They sounded to me like a good way to keep my bearings, if I was forced to enter the tangle of smaller streets and lanes.

‘Perhaps they are watchtowers,’ Ana said, and Swallow concurred.

I was not so sure. If Dragon knew the towers, that meant they had existed in her mother’s time, and the Red Queen had not sounded the sort to have watchtowers. Who would they spy on after all, given the bay was protected by lofty peninsulas with only a narrow opening, and in the other direction there was only the vast barren plain. I also had the feeling I had heard the term infinity before without understanding what it referred to, and guessed it had probably been in a dream of Matthew or maybe Gilaine.

Gahltha tried to insist we remount, but I refused, pointing out that it was too hot and we had no idea if they would be able to find any of the succulents to quench their thirst, for although the sunken plain was the same hard red ground as the ground we had traversed, it was more broken and fissured, and there was a thicker shifting overlay of soft fine red sand that collected in depressions and rifts. When Sendari stumbled badly, we slowed down considerably, and Swallow and Ana began to walk ahead, probing the ground with her arrows wherever there was a thick layer of dust.

The heat and the dust and the slowness combined to make all of us thirstier than ever and I felt increasingly impatient and irritable, a mood shared by Maruman, who was riding on my shoulders and complained constantly that I was gnawing at my thoughts too much and moving too erratically. Finally, I shifted him to Gahltha’s back, without asking for his permission. He complained about that too, claiming absurdly that it was hotter up there, but in fact he stretched himself out comfortably and went to sleep.

By the time we reached a long, shallow, rocky depression that looked like a dry creek bed, the sun was blazing down relentlessly and my head was pounding. We had decided to stop there for a rest, in the hope of finding an overhang that would offer us a bit of shade, but to my delight, Gahltha sent to me that he could smell water, and Rasial agreed. It was startling to discover that water was trickling from the end of a large Beforetime pipe jutting out from the side of the depression. None of us could imagine what the pipe was for, save that it had once carried water from one place to another. But Darga sniffed it where it had pooled in the deepest part of the depression, and despite being a murky red colour, he pronounced it clean and drinkable, and promptly proved it. That was enough for the beasts and for Gavyn, who immediately drank their fill. When they shifted back, the water was somewhat stirred up, and Ana suggested we wait a little to drink, and in the meantime she would prepare a proper meal as a celebration that we were within a day of Redport. We wet our mouths and faces, and I waited impatiently for the red sediment to settle.

I was not so sure we would reach the coast by nightfall, as the others assumed, for if the way was as broken and treacherous as it had been so far, it would be very slow going.

‘Should we light a fire?’ Swallow asked. ‘If there are people manning those watchtowers . . .’

‘I think a little smudge of smoke will not be visible when the slightest breeze stirs up the dust,’ I said, and asked if there was aught I could do.

‘Maybe you can try to farseek Redport again,’ Ana suggested. ‘See if you can make contact with your Matthew.’

I had told them about the interference, but I tried again anyway, with the same result.

Once the water settled we drank deeply, then filled some containers and Swallow’s cook pot. I had bathed aboard the glide, as had Ana, but now Swallow and Dameon decided to bathe as best they could. When they had finished, Ana even managed to persuade Dragon to wash.

‘After all, a queen cannot have a dirty neck or red dust in her hair,’ she laughed.

Dragon gave her a look of mingled dismay and disgust, as if it had not occurred to her that being a queen might require her to bathe. I hid a smile, wondering if it would strike her that, as queen, she could make a decree insisting people have dirty faces if they liked. With no experience of governing, she must have cobbled together her own version of what would be required of her based on the memory of her mother’s rule and on seeing how things were managed at Obernewtyn, but perhaps she had also begun to form her own ideas. It would be interesting to see what she would do as a ruler.

Swallow interrupted my musings to suggest we stay where we were until dusk. It made sense to rest where there was water, and we were close enough to the settlement on the coast that we ought not to travel in broad daylight in case someone moving outside the settlement, or looking out from the watchtowers spotted us.

Quashing the impulse to snap at him that we did not know if they
were
watchtowers, I helped him unfold the awning and secure it along the edge of the depression, so as to take advantage of the natural shade when the sun began to set. ‘
Is
it a city, then?’ I asked,

‘As far as I can tell, it is the only settlement in this land.’

After we had removed the bundles from the horses, they trotted away to see if they could find anything to graze on, though I did not hold out much hope for them. We had not seen so much as a patch of wiregrass since we had come to the sunken plain. Ana, Dragon and I set out our bedding, such as it was, under the awning while Swallow lit a small pit fire in the dry end of the depression and set about making a stew. Dameon offered to make campbread if there was flour, somewhat to my surprise.

‘Blyss showed me when she and Merret were escorting me to see Dell,’ he said, smiling. He was determined to cook something nourishing while he had enough water. Rasial and Gavyn, having drunk and splashed for a time in the pool at the end of the depression, now stretched themselves on the edge of it in the sun. Maruman was curled up on Dameon’s lap and Ana decided to wash her hair. She asked Dragon to help her, no doubt to entice the girl into the water to have her own hair washed. My hair felt sweaty and thick with dust, but I saw no point in washing it yet.

When the smell of cooking food began to fill the air, my mouth watered and my stomach started to growl. Unable to sit still for impatience, I went to stare out towards the coast, trying to make myself see the settlement Swallow described, but it eluded me. I called out to ask Swallow to come and point it out to me so that I could at least know exactly where to send my probe.

He bade Dameon stir the stew he had been making and came to stand by me and point to where he saw the buildings, then he frowned and narrowed his eyes.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Away from the buildings, inland and a little north of the settlement, I can see mounds of some sort.’

Squint and strain as I might, I could no more see the curving line of mounded hills he described than I had been able to see the settlement itself. But when he told the others what he saw, Dameon suggested the mounds might be the mines mentioned in his dreams, for they had been described as forming an arc slightly inland and north-east of Redport.

I could not see how mounds could be mines, unless the mounds were actually hills into which the mines burrowed. Their talk of mines reminded me of Matthew speaking in my dreams about a mine in or near a chasm that was the lair of some dreadful mutant beast, contained perhaps only because of the poisonous rift that gave it succour. How could such a mine be inside a mound and how could the chasm be tainted, for that matter, if the Red Land had been left untouched by the Great White? Unless the taint had not been caused by the Great White. After all, the teknoguilders always said there were areas akin to Blacklands in the Beforetime that were the result of the activities of people.

I was so hungry that I could think of nothing at all for a time except eating Swallow’s stew. I had to force myself not to shovel the food down and burn my mouth. Even when the first rage of hunger began to abate, I only half listened to the speculations of the others about the mounds, which Swallow now called hillocks. I was remembering how Matthew had said the slavemasters sent troublesome slaves to work in the pit where the beast dwelt as a punishment that sometimes became a death sentence, since the creature devoured passing miners when it was hungry. During my dream, Daffyd’s brother Jow had warned Matthew to mind himself lest his master send him to the notorious chasm pit. Matthew had laughed, saying he was far too valuable as an overseer to be squandered like that. Jow had not laughed, I remembered, which suggested the warning had been seriously meant. Given Matthew’s rashness, it had probably been warranted, too.