The Dark Queen (11 page)

There was no word in hawk for what happened next, either. Though Fordus's scouts were
sharp-eyed, skilled in reading trail and terrain, the subtle change in the nearby sands
raised no alarm at first. By morning the dunes had shifted to encircle a huge, undulating
mass of sand. The men were curious. A dozen of them, veterans of a hundred journeys and a
score of battles, crouched around the disturbance, regarding it cautiously, intently. It
was a springjaw at worst, they told themselves, setting its funneled trap for unwary
travelers. More likely a sandling, or the simple change of an overnight wind. So the
scouts kept their posts and turned their sights to the far horizons, to the edge of the
salt flats to anything, in short, except the whorling, lifting sands at their feet.
Indeed, they had almost forgotten this strange movement when the first rumbling shook the
ground around them. The youngest of the scouts, standing not twenty yards from the
disturbance, pointed and screamed . .. And was swallowed by the first spray of molten sand
that surged from the ruptured heart of the desert. Dumbstruck, two other scouts fell
seconds later, as the sands all around them erupted and, like an eerie, hidden volcano,
rained glowing glass upon Plainsman and bandit alike. Overhead, the bard's hawk soared to
a great height, the heat on his wings unbearable even at a thousand feet above this sudden
holocaust. The bird cried out, again and again. “ It was less than an hour before Fordus
reached the site of the eruptions. Larken and Stormlight fol- lowed him/and Northstar and
the woman Tanila. Gormion and a dozen of her bandits were not far behind. What they saw
was a desert scarred unnaturally by fissures and craters and chasms, glazed over with a
steaming, muddy caul. It looked like a country imagined from heat and light and attendant
fire. Shadows of indignant desert birds reeled far overhead, and at the edges of the
spreading lava the sand crackled, melted, and added to the rising flood. For a moment, the
handful of rebels fell silent. For-dus, his injury forgotten, took one firm step toward
the smoldering landscape. Stormlight walked to his side, took his arm, and held him back.
Slowly, the sand at the center of the great wound hardened to dark crystal. ”What is it?"
Gormion hissed, her hand slipping absurdly to the hilt of her dagger. She received no
answer. Neither Plainsman nor Prophet nor bard could decipher this mystery. Yet one among
them knew. One who veiled her knowledge behind expressionless amber eyes. There were other
gods in the Abyss, just as eager as Takhisis to enter the world and turn the tide of
history to their liking. Zeboim had followed Takhisis once, and Morgionthe tempests in
coastal waters and the plagues borne out of the marshes were testament to their
ingenuitybut they lacked the power to stay more than minutes, more than an hour at most.
But when the sand glazed and melted that day in the Istarian desert, spreading slowly
toward the Plainsman encampment beneath the Red Plateau and destroying everything in its
path, it was prelude to something far greater, far more disruptive. Takhisis recognized
that at once. Another of her kinda strong one with powers to rival her ownhad discovered
her secret and followed her through the crystalline gap between worlds. And she knew who
he was.

“What is it?” Gormion asked again, more insistently this time as the molten sand slowly
swallowed the dunes. “Volcano,” Stormlight replied tersely, his eyes never leaving the
glowing swirl of glass. “I've seen them before. Long ago, from the foothills of Tho-radin.
We had best move the camp, and quickly.” Gormion was more than ready to comply. Her silver
jewelry rattled as she waved wildly at her bandit followers, whistling and motioning them
back toward the camp. Fordus and Stormlight made ready to follow, but suddenly, as they
turned toward the Red Plateau, they were startled by a loud, unearthly screech.

Tanila lay in the path of the flowing slag, writhing and clutching her ankle. Without
thinking, Stormlight raced toward the fallen woman. In the sand his footing was unsteady,
and once, nightmarishly, he stumbled and fell, bracing himself on his hands not a foot
from the glowing, blistering pool. He felt the heat like a hundred suns, and his eyes,
blinked and smarted. With a cry, he closed the milky lucerna, pushed himself away from the
slag, and staggered to Tanila, slipping his arm about her waist and dragging her blindly
toward the safer crest of the nearest dune. She felt incredibly heavy, resistant in his
grasp. With a desperate heave, he drew her to safety, toppled over the far side of the
dune, and lay breathless, facedown in the sand. Around him a chaos of sounds eddied and
swirledthe cries of the bandits, North-star's voice carried on a white-hot wind. He could
not believe Tanila's heaviness, how hard and brittle her body had felt in his hands. It
was as though the slag had covered her and cooled, turning her to stone, to glass. He
turned toward her, incredulous, longing to touch her again. Her foot was missing, the
ankle snapped and severed like hewn stone, no blood flowing from the wound. Stormlight
gaped at the woman. She returned his stare coldly. A shout from Fordus disrupted his
thoughts. He sprang to his feet, and the earth split apart beneath him. Kneeling in a daze
at the edge of the slag, Storm-light watched the creature rise out of the fissured glaze,
its broad wings glittering with spark and ash. Fordus rushed out of the smoke, Northstar
and two of the bandits beside him, as the creature took shape out of fire and cloud: an
enormous hook-billed birdits shape that of a condor or vulture, its naked head blistered
and ugly, its black eyes glittering like gems. Fordus stopped in his tracks, dumbfounded,
as the bird wheeled above the desert, shrieking and smoldering. Below, the bandits hurled
axe and spear and imprecation, but all bounced harmlessly off the rough skin of the bird,
who pivoted slowly, ponderously, as though only recently come to its own body. With
another cry, the creature swooped awkwardly. Its attack was predictable and slow, its
sharp beak clattering against the shield of one of the bandit spearmen, a young man from
Kharolis named Ingaard. Ingaard feinted and laughed, and the bird staggered back,
preparing to lunge again. With a defiant cry, Ingaard braced himself to hurl his weapon,
but suddenly, as though the whole desert had fallen under a terrible, malign enchantment,
the lad's feet slipped in the tumbling sand, and he fell on his back, loosing the grip on
his spear. The condor's beak crashed against his uplifted shield, again and again until
the tough hide tore and the great bird snatched Ingaard into the air, rending his flesh
and hurling him into the molten slag. The other bandits turned and fled, screaming. Slowly
the creature pivoted toward Tanila, its eyes glowing red and smoke rising from its dark,
angular feathers. Again, it fanned its wings, and the hot fetid air swirled like a
hurricane around the Plainsmen. Tanila, enraged, lost her balance in the eddying sand, but
Stormlight alertly stepped between her and the monster, raising the bronze buckler of one
of the fallen bandits. With a shriek, the condor lunged toward Stormlight, lightning
blazing from its black, depthless eyes. The bolts flickered and danced around the elf, who
braced himself as the smoldering bird struck

him, stopping the searching claws with the little shield and pushing the monster back and
away. There was a shattering sound, like porcelain or glass, and the great bird groaned
and drew his head back, his long neck arched like a scorpion's tail. For a moment the
desert was silent, as though sound itself had passed through the fissures and vanished.
Elf and monster faced one another in a desolation of sand and rising steam.

“Kill him!” Tanila hissed. And then, with a cry that was no doubt heard at the gates of
Istar, the condor lurched after Storm- light. The elf stepped back, then lost his balance
as the great beast cleared the edge of the slag, for a moment grotesquely in flight above
the desert. With another deafening cry the condor swooped, falling upon Stormlight and
driving him to the ground amid a gauntlet of slashing talons. Larken whistled for her hawk
and snatched her drumhammer from her belt. Deftly stepping over a widening fissure, she
raced toward higher, more solid ground, rifling her memory for a powerful music.
Stormlight fell to his knees, bent backward by the weight of the creature. The condor
hovered tri- umphantly over the struggling elf, its claws digging at his rib cage, its
neck arched for a final, fatal strike. Stormlight cried out and glanced beseechingly
toward Fordus ... Who was about other business entirely.

*****

Fordus stood on a narrow natural bridge of rock and dried earth left by the lake of molten
sand that bubbled and swirled on the desert plain. It was a thin strip of solid ground,
untouched by the fire and magma, and narrowing slowly as the hot current ate against its
foundations. It was the country of his dreams: the fire, the lava, the dark bird.

He stood breathless, abstracted, until the shouts of his men awakened him. Fordus was
faced with a choice. Stormlight lay in the pocked and bubbling field, the condor over him,
batting its burning wings, while Northstar, only a dozen feet away, stared desperately
into the glowing liquid, calling plaintively for help. Stormlight was in peril, it was
plain to see. But the condor ... Was Fordus's old friend, his dream-summoner. And
Stormlight. . . was dissident. A troublesome lieutenant. Whatever happened to him was in
the lap of the gods. Fordus rushed toward Northstar, pulling the lad from the lip of the
widening chasm. “My medallion!” Northstar cried. “The disk!” Fordus knew what he meant at
once. The religious pendant, given to Northstar on his naming night, was a bronze replica
of one of the fabled Disks of Mishakal. Worthless to anyone but the devoted lad, it now
hung by its broken chain from an outcropping of rock scarcely a foot above the widening
crevasse. “Walk carefully toward the high ground!” Fordus shouted, leaning over the
burning lake, his lean, muscular arm stretching toward the medallion, his fingers spread
and extended. “Save yourself, North-star!” It sounded heroic, like the stuff of Larken's
poetry. It would make for a good song in the evening's Telling.

*****

On his back in the middle of the steaming field, Stormlight pushed the bird away yet
again. His arms were seared by the hot metal buckler he carried, and the smell of sulfur
and burnt rock singed his nostrils, rushed down his throat and into his lungs. Once again,
he tried to cry out, but the pain was unbearable, smothering.

So this is the way it ends, he thought, strangely calm, the smoke gusting into his eyes
and the hoarse cry of the condor on all sides of him. The dull, dry shriek of the bird was
answered by a call more shrill, and suddenly, miraculously, the sky cleared over
Stormlight. He blinked painfully, scrambled to his feet.

Lucas swooped toward the Red Plateau, the condor glowing and smoldering in pursuit.
Swiftly, gracefully, the little hawk banked in the air, dodging the heavier, clumsier bird
with a grace born of a thousand hunts, of a year's reconnaissance in the desert sky.
Blindly, furiously the condor followed, the ground beneath the path of its flight
blistering and blazing at its passage. The hawk flew a wide, looping circle and returned
toward the field and Stormlight, the condor picking up speed, swiftly closing the gap
until it seemed that Lucas would be caught, ignited, consumed by the fiery monster. Then
Larken, standing on a sloping rise, seeing the danger to her companion, battered her drum
loudly, slowly, in the stately Matherian rhythms of high magic. The song began in an
incandescence of words, an elvish tralyta that trailed off into a hidden language, into
the words that bards speak only in whispers, and only to the gods. But the little bard
gave her song full voice, and at the margins of the lava flow, the red glaze darkened and
crusted, cooling so rapidly that the sound of its shattering echoed over the desert. Still
the bard's song rose above the chaos and noise, the words completely unintelligible now,
trail- ing into birdsong, into distant thunder and the rush of water, into the sound of
the wind through^the nearby crystals. The crystals themselves, at the edge of the Tears of
Mishakal, were breaking to shards, crumbling silently to powder. Lucas soared high above
the cooling earth, then dropped five hundred feet through the smoky air, landing roughly
on the sand and mantling, his wings spread over him like a tent, a canopy. The condor
followed, a trail of flame in its wake, stretching its glowing talons to strike. Then,
fifty feet above the floor of the desert, the monster collided with the power of the
bard's song. Tanila whirled and shrieked and covered her ears. For a moment, out of the
corner of her eye, Larken saw the dark woman hobble toward the Tears of Mishakal, trailing
black dust like a cloud of billowing smoke. Then suddenly, spectacularly, the air went
incandescent. The condor splintered into a thousand sparks, slowly raining deadly flame
over the parched land- scape, the igneous rock, the cowering bird. Just before the fire
shower reached Lucas, Storm-light/ racing over the hot ground, snatched up the hawk and
hurled him free of the deadly rain. Lucas tumbled through the air, regained his balance
and wings, and soared clear of the fire as Stormlight sprang free of the burning earth,
rolling, his clothing on fire. Larken rushed to the elf, but by the time she reached him,
the fire was smothered and he lay, dazed and breathless, in the shadow of a huge cactus.
Shimmering steam rose from the condor's ashes and spread angrily across the fire-ravaged
plains. The bard crouched over the elf-warrior, singing a brief song of healing and
gratitude. Groggily, leaning on Larken's shoulder, Stormlight rose to his feet, looked her
level in the eyes, as though he saw her for the first time, past the roughness and dirt,
the weathering and the matted, neglected white hair. Suddenly, Fordus shouted in triumph
across the smoldering plain. The War Prophet stood on the narrow strand of earth, holding
aloft a brightly shimmering object, red and golden as the afternoon sun. He danced a
victory dance, and Northstar, safely on the other end of the strand, danced with him.
“He's mad!” Stormlight whispered. “Fordus is completely and red-mooned mad!” Larken
remained silent, her hands occupied in gently supporting the injured elf. Fordus lifted
aloft the medallion again, laughing and whistling. But suddenly the dark smoke bundled and
rushed toward him at a blinding speed. Trapped on the narrow bridge, he could not elude
it, could not outrun it. In an instant it engulfed him, swirled about him like a
whirlpool, like a maelstrom, then dissolved into the clear desert daylight, leaving him
lifeless on the scored and