The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) (41 page)

The Dark Queen

Kate turned back to look questioningly at Qwenqwo, his arm around Mo’s shoulders, as, accompanied by Mark, she made her way in an awkward silence toward the great stairway ascending to the Rath high above them.

Mark asked her, “Are you alright, Kate?”

“I’m far from alright.” She paused to look at him, with his battle-axe strapped to his back within the leather harness. “What in heaven’s name was that all about?”

“I’m no wiser than you are.”

“Oh, come on, Mark. Our destinies—those were the words Qwenqwo used. What are we to make of that?”

“I know one thing. Qwenqwo is right—the succubus will come back.”

“And you’re what—my protector? Even if it kills you? My God—do you have any idea how bonkers that sounds?”

“Hey—you’re looking at Mark the Barbarian!”

The ghost of a smile dimpled Kate’s cheeks as they emerged from the paved streets at the very northern edge of the city, arriving at a point where any defensive wall would have been superfluous. Below them the mountainside fell sheer for several thousand feet. Kate exclaimed, “You know what I think? This is the mountain we dreamed about, back home!”

“You’re probably right.”

For a few moments they stood and gazed up at the stone staircase that led to the Rath, hacked out of the living stone of the crag and winding up hundreds of feet. The passage was so ancient that the treads had been worn down to saddle-shaped depressions. There were no handrails in spite of the precipices to either side. Awed into silence, they started to climb. The staircase twisted and turned, at this lower level delving under the canopies of evergreens or bridging over swiftly running streams. At one turn they passed under a gossamer fall of water, perhaps a hundred feet high, that fanned their sweating faces with a refreshing mist of rain. To look down was to invite a swooning dizziness.

Soon they were above all vegetation, so high their gazes soared over the entire Vale of Tazan, including the river that encircled the island and the forested slopes beyond the tributaries to either side.

“I’m sorry, Kate. Well, you know—”

“Oh, Mark!” She knew what he meant. But what did it matter any more? She just squeezed his arm for a moment.

“Still friends?”

“We never stopped being friends.” Kate blinked with embarrassment, looking past Mark and up to the tower that was surprisingly intact despite the fact it had been abandoned so long ago. Judging from the dense proliferation of lichens, it had remained uninhabited ever since. She said, thoughtfully, “That stuff—about fate—our destinies—you know Qwenqwo really has me in a panic, wondering what we’re going to find.”

She stared up at the tower, with its single glazed window, and farther above it at the statue of the queen, Nantosueta, now looming much larger than Kate would have imagined from below. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the Tyrant’s armies—the Leguns—didn’t trash all this?”

Mark blew out through pouched cheeks and did a cartoon voice, “Thuffering thuffocats! Another mythery!”

Kate laughed, a jittery union of spirits.

“I think we’re expected to explore the tower.”

There was a doorway up ahead under a triangular arch of stones. Some of the stones of the walls had tumbled out onto the approach. They skirted the rubble to enter an atrium, where a spiral of marble steps led higher. Here the sense of foreboding became so oppressive that Mark reached up and touched his battle-axe. With a rising nervousness, they continued to climb.

Step by step, they ascended the first story to emerge into an elevated cloister. Mark warned Kate back from where broken pediments hovered over an abyss. Peering around herself carefully, she could see that a section of outer wall had collapsed, exposing the cloister to the howling wind. Mark helped her inch past the danger, passing through into a pentagonal loggia. This was lined by colonnaded arches, each double pillar of shining marble coral red and surmounted with carved reliefs. This inner architecture lacked the exquisite sophistication of Ossierel. It looked much older, more primitive. They padded, single file, along a narrow cloister, past openings leading to individual cells. Each cell was illuminated by a single unglazed window. Kate had the impression of some kind of a convent community, like the nuns back home.

Entering one of the cells, her instincts picked up an aura of violence. Though there were no bones—time would have withered bones to dust—the floors were littered with green-encrusted bronzes, scattered and broken, too precious to have been willingly abandoned. It confirmed what Qwenqwo had told them of the history. There had been a violent invasion of Nantosueta’s religious order in this secret valley with its brooding forests. It had ended badly. Kate couldn’t help but shiver, calling out for Mark to hold on to her.

They arrived at another entrance, cut deep into the wall at the end of the cloister. It was sealed by a bronze door, thickly encrusted with green verdigris. The door
was battered and torn from its hinges, presumably a result of that same violence long ago.

“You want to stop and turn around here?”

“I . . . I don’t know.” Kate was feeling increasingly scared.

“You don’t have to go on. Just say the word and we’ll head back down.”

Kate shook her head. “You heard what Qwenqwo told us to do. He thought it was important. I think we’ve no choice but to carry on.”

Mark squeezed through the broken door and ascended a spiral staircase of marble. It was pretty obvious now where this was leading. He was inside the corner tower, with its flashing window, like an eye watching out over the valley. After another climb of perhaps thirty steps he came to another bronze door, its hinges fractured like the last, that led into the summit chamber. Dust as white as a swan’s breast carpeted the floor.

The dust was inches deep, so undisturbed through time it looked like virgin snow. The dust was much thicker than Mark had seen in the ruins of Ossierel. It suggested that nobody had come here for centuries. His initial impression was of an empty room, at least thirty feet in diameter, his gaze lifting to the star-shaped window on one corner, glazed with stained glass. Though only a poor light penetrated the dusty panes, a profusion of colors flowed into the chamber, projecting
shapes and hues onto the walls and floor like a slightly out of focus phantasmagoria of a coral lagoon.

Kate appeared in the doorway behind him.

He shook his head. “There’s nothing here—it’s empty!”

“Let me have a look.”

She came into the chamber with a noiseless blur of footsteps, leaving impressions as clear as his own in the virgin dust. He watched her turn in a full circle at the center of the chamber, as if examining the strange patterns of light and color over the walls and ceiling, before blinking several times and then standing utterly still, her eyes falling shut. Mark had the impression that it was Kate, rather than the room, who was the focus of the light show coming in through the stellate window. Mark jumped when Kate reopened her eyes and he saw that they had been invaded by a brilliant matrix of green, in which motes of gold pulsed and flickered into life.

“Kate! What’s happening to you?”

“I . . . I don’t know.”

Mark tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry. Staring at Kate’s familiar oval face framed by her auburn hair, he hardly recognized her any more, not this new Kate with the crystal matrix in her eyes. He murmured, “What you said about the chamber—what did you see, exactly, when looked inside?”

Kate walked stiffly across the floor, as if moving in a dream, and confronted the stellate window. Then, hauling herself up onto the broad stone sill, she wiped
the dust from the central portion of the stained glass. She held her crystal against it, so the incoming light passed through it. Mark’s eye caught a sparkle of movement in the air, a rainbow diffraction of colors, before a series of what he initially took to be holograms took shape in the beam of light. But the images were too vivid for holograms. They seemed to be infused with life. With a gasp of surprise, he joined her at the window, wiping clear a greater portion.

He had mistaken the panes for stained glass. Now he saw that they were crystals of many different shapes and colors.

“What did you do, just then?”

“I . . . I don’t know.”

The sun was still above the horizon, and its bright glow pervaded the chamber. Mark sat in a bewildered panic next to Kate on the window sill and looked at the fantastic play of light and shadow that now filled the chamber. The patterns were increasing in complexity and wonder, thrilling his senses with a flickering motion of reds and indigos, leaf-greens and gold—as if threatening to become alive. He stiffened, his heart beating violently, as suddenly there was a more powerful burst of illumination—as if the sun out there in the Valley of Tazan had come out from behind a cloud.

He turned to Kate and whispered, “How can this be happening?”

Kate didn’t reply.

Turning to the chamber, Mark found himself looking into a summery glade. Young saplings hung over
a dappled stream. He could have reached out and touched the bluebells and forget-me-nots that grew on the banks. He could hear the burbling of the water, the faint sigh of the breeze through the leaves and the trembling lances of reeds. Then, no matter how impossible it ought to be, he heard birdsong. He saw a dark-haired girl laughing as she pirouetted among the slender trunks, as abandoned as the breeze, now dancing forward to take his hand and lead him down to the stream.

An exquisite thrill ran through his fingers at the touch of her hand. He looked at her face, saw that it really was human—the face of a real girl and not a doll, like the succubus. She was beautiful—
lovely
.

But his experience with the succubus, Siri, still filled him with dread. Dropping into the glade, he tested the pebbles through the stream’s rippling current. They felt solid, wet . . . real. He splashed the water over his face, felt the icy spray of contact, the refreshing sensation on his skin.

He forced himself to remember Qwenqwo’s words:
Look for the shade of one whose fate it is to linger there.

What was really going on? Was it all just a dream—or some kind of hallucination? It felt too real to be either of these. He was conscious, able to question what was happening. Somehow, in spite of the fact it was completely impossible, it was real.

“Will you share the joy of the forest with me?” The girl’s voice rang out through the wonder of the woodland scene.

Laughing hoarsely, his happiness cutting through any lingering disbelief, Mark threw off his boots and axe to run with the girl through the soft meadow, loving the soft feel of the grass and loam under his feet. Mark knew he was looking at the girl queen, Nantosueta. But she didn’t seem evil as Qwenqwo had described her. Even her voice was girlish.
Lovely!
Mark thought it again, blinking several times in astonishment at himself, at his own reactions.

How could he be imagining anything like this?

Through an arbor of blossoming trees, he saw the great ascending spiral of stone steps rising from a mountain meadow as they must have appeared two thousand years ago, those steps above what was now the plateau of Ossierel, climbing to the great pentagonal tower on the summit of the tor. That tower, in this vision, had no figure on the pinnacle. He recalled Qwenqwo’s words:
Discover what lesson, if any, is to be learned from it.

What could he possibly make of this?

Two thousand years ago the young queen, Nantosueta, had faced the same forces of evil that they faced today. A desperate war had been fought out in the forests and on this plateau. The enemy forces had broken through into the cloisters and cells below this very chamber. They had murdered everybody and destroyed the spiritual center of the temple complex, then battered down the doors to get to Nantosueta herself. What must have gone through the mind of the queen in those final desperate moments?

Mark thought that he knew now what Nantosueta would have considered. One last act of defiance . . .

The will to defeat those forces of evil would have overwhelmed everything else until, however brutal her actions now appeared, to her in that moment they became her only hope. Something terrible, something extraordinary, had been invoked by Nantosueta in those final minutes, as the enemy battered their way through that final bronze door.

Mark emerged, blinking, from the vision. “You were always a step ahead of me, Kate.”

Kate gazed back at him without replying as the crystal matrices metamorphosed from moment to moment in her eyes. A power was controlling Kate, one that Mark didn’t understand. Then she was directing him back into the vision, as if she had conjured up the greatest thrill of all.

Mark was back in the summery glade once more, aware of the young woman who had danced with him only moments ago, but who now stood among the trees, silent and still, as if observing him. Her hair was a downy cataract of blue-black and she was dressed simply in a white linen gown and sandals. Her face, bare of adornment, was terrible with purpose, her left hand splayed toward the ground and her right arm raised to the sky. On her brow she bore an oraculum, an inverted triangle of the Trídédana, similar to Alan’s, but where Alan’s was a ruby, her oraculum was black.

He didn’t dare to blink, so arresting was the realization that was now running through his mind.

There was barely time to take in those gesturing hands—the one, as it seemed, stretched to the heavens, and the other, with its fingers and thumb extended over her beloved valley—and then she was gone.

It was as if the sun had set over the valley. The image of the woodland scene faded at once. Mark and Kate stood in the thick dust, facing each other beside the crystal window in the empty chamber. Kate looked bewildered, but Mark was relieved to see that her eyes had returned to normal. He took her shoulders between his own trembling hands.

“Did you see . . . ?”

Kate nodded, tears rising into her eyes.

Mark helped Kate to climb the final narrow spiral of steps. They stood on the platform cut from the rock of the crag, above which the gigantic statue stood sentinel over the pass. Their gazes lifted skyward to discover that the beautiful face of the girl in the glade had been replaced with a mask of fury. In her brow was the triangle, black as obsidian.