The Born Queen (19 page)

The patir was beet-red now, but the fratrex only smiled an odd little smile.

“I see.” He leaned forward. “I’m going to give you a bit of time to think about this, my friend.” He nodded, and the patir clapped his hands. A door he hadn’t noticed opened, and five large monks entered.

Cazio met the man’s gaze dead on. “I will tell you one thing: You shouldn’t go to Eslen. Anne will crush you.”

The Fratrex Prismo shook his head. “No, she won’t. I know something she doesn’t. If you help me, she might live. Otherwise I fear for her.”

“Fear for yourself,” Cazio snarled. “If you threaten Anne, I will have to kill you myself.”

“Really?” the fratrex said. “Well, you might as well do it now.” He nodded at the guards. “Gentlemen, loan us a pair of swords, won’t you.”

“Your grace,” one of the men said. He removed his heavy cut-and-thrust weapon and walked it over to the fratrex. Another man brought Cazio his own weapon, Acredo.

Cazio took the hilt. Certainly it was a trick of some sort, but at least he would go down fighting, not tortured to death in some dungeon.

He stood, not raising the sword until Niro Marco took the position of guard.

With an amazing quickness that belied his earlier assertion, the man lunged at him. Cazio caught the blade in
perto,
bound it down to
uhtave,
and struck the Fratrex Prismo of the holy Church in the chest.

Except that the point stopped as if he had hit a wall. For an instant he thought the fellow was wearing a breastplate, but then he saw the truth: His point wasn’t touching the man; it was stuck in something a fingers-breadth from Niro Marco’s chest.

He tried to yank the weapon back for another blow, but all of a sudden his arms and legs went loose and he was on the floor.

“Now,” he heard the fratrex say, “these men will take you to a place of contemplation, but I’m going to warn you: I can’t allow you to reflect for long. I’m here only for a short time, and then I must go to Eslen, with or without any help you may be able to give me. I would like to save you, but if you don’t have anything to tell me by tomorrow, I’m going to have to encourage you any way I can. If that’s no use, well, perhaps we can still lustrate your soul before it leaves this world. It’s the least I can do for your father.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

T
HE
W
ALK
B
EGINS

W
HEN THE WITCHLIGHTS
went out, Stephen shouted and batted at the darkness. Adhrekh hollered orders, and Zemlé screamed. Then something rough struck him, and he heard a deep, ragged gasp of breath. His feet stood suddenly on nothing, and he heard a second shout, this one in that other voice.

Do not trust…

Then silence and wind and the wait for the stop at the end.

Something hit him again and knocked all the air out of him. The pain was blinding, but he still could feel, so he figured he wasn’t dead.

That wasn’t so bad,
he thought.
The floor mustn’t have been as far as I thought.

But as he hiccupped air into his lungs, Stephen understood that something had him gripped tightly around the torso, and they were still hurling through the darkness. Was it one of the Aitivar, diving in a vain attempt to save him?

But they weren’t moving so much down as
forward.
Whatever had him was flying.

What could fly that was large enough to carry a man? Only something from legend and likely something nasty: a wyver, a dragon…

He cried for help but had the feeling the sounds were dying just past his lips. He couldn’t struggle. Even if he could, and succeeded, it would mean a long fall.

The smell hit him again, and the creeping sensation of something infinitely malevolent surrounding him, and he suddenly felt stone smack against his feet. Whatever had gripped him had released him, and he fell on his bottom.

He scuttled back, crablike, in terror to escape from the thing. A hard stone wall stopped his retreat.

The darkness remained elementally absolute.

“What do you want?” Stephen gasped. “I—what do you want of me?”

He was answered by a thunder of incomprehensible words that seemed to roll around him, a gibbering no human throat could make. Part of him was fascinated despite the horror. Was this the language of demons?

“I can’t—”

“Hush.”

It went in his head like a pin through an insect. His mouth froze open.

“Is this the one?” the thing went on. “Are you the one? Are you shadow or substance?”

The voice was burring right in his ear—in both ears, in fact, as if whoever it was somehow was whispering in them both. It didn’t sound like a human voice, but he couldn’t say exactly why.

Stephen still couldn’t move his mouth, so he couldn’t answer.

“The smell of you,” the voice continued. “Revolting. I don’t understand how you don’t take your own lives from that alone.”

It paused, and Stephen had the sense of something immense slithering around him. But when it spoke again, its voice was still right in his ears.

“You smell of other things, too. You stink of the sedoi. It all rots in you, mayfly. All comes to you to rot. Or will.”

Stephen was shivering uncontrollably. He still could move his limbs, and he did—to roll up into a ball.

“Hold still,”
the voice commanded.

Then he couldn’t move at all, although the trembling in his limbs continued.

Suddenly the needle through his mind began to wiggle, and he was standing in front of the fane of Saint Ciesel in the King’s Forest. The forest rose up around him like columns supporting the cloudy sky. The fane was a tidy little structure of gray stone with a low-vaulted roof.

He blinked. He was staring at a different fane, that of Saint Woth.

And then he didn’t have time to blink as he flashed from place to place and from time to time. He was nine, looking off the cliffs behind his house and smelling the sea. He was watching Zemlé pull off her shirt. He was relieving himself behind a bush off the Old King’s Road. He was watching Aspar kiss Winna.

Part of him understood that these were memories, but it all felt absolutely real: The weight of himself on his feet shifted—sometimes he wasn’t on his feet—the scents, the temperature of the air, and it all went faster and faster until his thinking mind suddenly stepped away from it all, watched it flow like a river. Not trying to recognize anything but just watching it ripple and move.

And after a moment he noticed another stream, deep and dark, running alongside him, almost touching, then joining and broadening the river.

What’s this?

But then even his ability to form questions disintegrated.

It took him a long time to understand when it was over, that he was back in one place and time, still shivering in the dark and paralyzed. He realized that the thing was talking to him again, and probably had been for some time.

“…going through it? Nonsense. I feel the bones. The bones are there. And blood in them, yes? In them. Ah, you’re back. Listen, mayfly. He doesn’t know me, not for sure. I like it that way. I think you will, too. So helpful, isn’t he? Do you ever wonder why he wants you to walk the faneway? Do you ever wonder that?”

Yes,
Stephen tried to answer.

“Come, tell—ah, wait. I see. It’s already working. You may speak in response to my questions.”

He felt something like a knot untying in his throat, and he gagged and then vomited. He kept heaving long after there was nothing left in his stomach.

“Answer my question,” the darkness snarled.

“Yes,” Stephen replied through his gasping. “I’ve wondered.” He wanted desperately to ask who he was speaking to but found he couldn’t.

“Do you know
who
it is?”

I won’t tell you anything,
he thought. “I won’t tell you that I think it’s the ghost of Kauron.”

He suddenly realized that he’d said what he was thinking out loud, and he groaned. What sort of shinecraft was this?

“Kauron?” it said. “That’s a name. That doesn’t mean anything. Do you know
who
he is?”

“That’s all I know,” Stephen said, feeling the words rush out of him. “He helped me find the mountain and the faneway.”

“Of course he did. No one wants you to walk that path more than he.”

Stephen didn’t bother trying to ask why.

“Well, walk it you will,” the voice purred. “I have no objection.”

Stephen felt the beat of wings and a rush of air. He uncoiled like a spring and then went loose, the shaking finally easing out of him.

Stephen lay there for a while, sick at heart, wondering how he ever could have imagined himself brave. It was the same old story: Every time he was close to feeling in command of himself and his world, the saints showed him something to shatter him again.

He opened his eyes and found that the witchlights were back with him. He was still somewhere beneath the earth but no longer in the vast open canyon where he had been abducted; nor was the river anywhere within sight, although he could hear it somewhere, far away.

He couldn’t hear anything that might be his companions either, even with his sedos-touched ears. He called experimentally, not expecting a response and not receiving one.

He tried not to think about the very plausible explanation that they were all dead. They couldn’t be, because that would mean Zemlé was dead, and she wasn’t.

So where was he?

The cavern was very low-roofed, so much so that he couldn’t stand, but it went on farther than the witchlights revealed in every direction.

Anne Dare had described a place like this; she had called it the “stooping room.” Had his kidnapper actually brought him to the start of the faneway?

Kauron, where are you now?

But there was no answer.

He didn’t feel like moving. He didn’t feel like doing anything. But after a moment he did, coming up to his hands and knees. He picked the direction where he seemed to feel the faneway most strongly and started toward it.

He didn’t have to go far. A column of stone appeared ahead, about as big around as a large oak tree. Scratched into it was the old Virgenyan symbol for “one.”

He paused. He had never encountered a sedos underground before. Above ground they usually appeared as small hills, though sometime they were rock outcroppings or depressions. What saint had left his footprint here, and how was he supposed to approach it properly? The faneways of the Church had shrines with depictions of the appropriate saint to help prepare the mind and body to receive his power. Here there was no such clue unless the number was some sort of cipher. But it probably just meant that this was the first place he was supposed to visit.

How had
she
known the order? Her journal didn’t say.

Feeling weary, he crawled toward the sedos.

When he reached it, he stayed on his knees and reached toward the stone.

“I don’t know what saint you are,” he murmured. “Else I would come to you properly.”

Maybe it didn’t matter. The Revesturi—those renegade clergy who had helped Stephen find this place—claimed that there were no saints, that only the power was real.

He touched the stone.

Something pushed through his fingertips and ran down his arm. He gasped as it clamped around his heart and
squeezed.
He braced himself for the agony, but although everything in him warned him that pain was coming, it didn’t.

He rocked back on his haunches as the sensation faded. His skin tingled lightly. An incredible sense of well-being seemed to wash down from his head to his toes.

All his pains—small and large—were gone, and although he remembered that a few moments before he had been on the verge of absolute hopelessness, now he couldn’t even imagine feeling like that.

He touched the stone again, but the experience didn’t repeat itself.

Neither did it fade. He felt a smile tickle his face.

Why had he put this off? If this was any indication, walking this faneway was going to be a lot better than walking the last one.

He started off for the next station, which he now could sense as clearly as a voice calling him.

The roof dropped lower and lower as he progressed so that eventually he was crawling on his belly, his nose almost on the stone. A distant part of him felt claustrophobic, but it never became overwhelming. He felt too good, too confident that things were going his way now. Besides, at least two people had done this before and survived.

Soon enough his certainty was justified as the floor began dropping away. The walls came in, and soon he was back in a tunnel, albeit one moving downhill in a series of broken steps.

How long since a river had flowed through here? How long had it taken to cut the rock? An unimaginable period of time, surely.

How old was the world?

It wasn’t a question he’d thought much about. To be sure, there were scholars who had, and he had read the basic texts in his essentials at the college. There was plenty of speculation, but it fell into essentially two major schemes of thought: The world was created pretty much as it was a few thousand years ago, or it was very, very old.

Then as now, Stephen’s love for languages and ancient texts had been his central preoccupation, and the oldest texts in the world were only about two thousand years old. That was when Mannish history had begun. But there had been a Skasloi history before that, one that no one knew much of anything about. How long had the Skasloi kept slaves? How long had the Skasloi civilization existed? What was here before them, if anything?

These suddenly seemed to be very important questions, because it seemed to Stephen that the world had to have been around for a long time for water to dig channels through stone, abandon them, dig new ones, and so on. The saints certainly could have made caverns when they made dry land, but why make them appear as if they had been formed by natural processes that ought to take many thousands of years? They could do so, of course, but why?

And if there were no saints, if the power was just something that
was,
how long had
it
been here? Where had it come from?

How many times since the beginning of the world had someone—or something—walked this faneway, and what had happened?

The thought literally arrested him. So far as he knew, only Virgenya Dare and Kauron had walked this path. Virgenya Dare used the power to conquer and eradicate the Skasloi. Kauron didn’t seem to have survived to use his power. If he had, he surely would have stopped the rise of the Damned Saints, the Warlock Wars, and the unholy reign of the Black Jester.

Virgenya Dare had saved the Mannish and Sefry races from slavery. Kauron had died and failed to prevent what was in many ways a rebirth of the Skasloi evil. Now it seemed chaos and night were coming again, and it was his task to walk the fanes, wield the power, and set things right.

Could it really be that simple? Was he really the one? Would he succeed—or fail as Kauron had?

He shook his head. Why hadn’t the Skasloi walked the fanes? They must have known about them. How could they not?

“Because the saints love
us,
” Stephen said aloud. “They love what is right and good.”

But that sounded so silly that he suddenly knew for certain that he didn’t believe it anymore.

The next fane was a pool of very cold water. He approached it without hesitation and thrust his hands in, and in an instant he heard a voice. The language was a very ancient form of Thiuda, but before he could cipher it out, it was joined suddenly by ten more voices, then fifty, a thousand, a hundred thousand. He felt his jaw working and then didn’t feel much at all as his mind shouted to be heard, to stay different, to not be swept away in the ocean of weeping, pleading, screaming, cajoling. Now it was all one sound, a single voice saying everything and thus nothing, thinning, rising in pitch, gone.

He blinked and yanked his hands from the pool, but he knew it was too late because he could still hear that final tone, itching far in the back of his mind, waiting.

Waiting to swallow him.

And even as he tried to force the voices out, they were starting to emerge again, not from the pool this time but from his own head. And he knew that when they did come back, his mind would be swept away.