The Dark Queen (17 page)

had all been wrong, that they had been the good and loyal friends he remembered ... Anguis
glanced over Vincus's shoulder, a quick, flickering movement to his narrow eyes. Vincus
saw it, and spun about... In time to catch the drunkard's club, as it descended with swift
ferocity. For a moment Vincus stared his attacker face-to-face, saw the man's eyes widen,
smelled the stale wine... Then, with a strength born of life and health, of steady sleep
and three squares, he pushed the man aside and, spinning with a fierce, desperate lunge,
brought his fist crashing into the face of Ultion. Ultion fell back with a cry, but the
others leapt greedily onto Vincus. Strong fingers probed his throat, and a blinding punch,
hurtling out of nowhere, struck him firmly on the side of the head. He turned toward
Anguis, but the air itself seemed to resist him, and one man hit him, and then another.
The silver collar snapped and dropped from his neck, and Vincus fell to his knees on the
cobbled square, the drunkard stalking toward him, club raised. Suddenly, his assailants
scattered. Shouts followed them from an alley, a rushing column of torches. The Istarian
Guard, Vincus thought. I am safe. He looked down at the collar, the heavy silver broken in
two neat crescents at his knees. If the Guard caught him here even Vaananen could not help
him. Vincus crouched on the roof of the building, peering down like a bruised gargoyle
onto the milling soldiers. He had snatched up the collar and run, only steps È ahead of
the torches and shouting into the nearest alley. The window into the adjoining brewer's
shop was boarded, but not well. In less than a minute, his strength doubled in the desire
to escape, Vincus had pulled down the boards and scrambled into the darkened brewery.
Dropping into a stack of empty barrels, he clattered and rolled into the warm,
yeast-smelling darkness, lying still until the torches and shouting passed. Then he
ascended the stairs to the attic, and, stacking barrel on barrel, he clambered through
cobweb and rafter to the trapdoor in the ceiling, firmly bolted from the inside against
acrobatic trespassers. Vincus threw back the rusty bolt and climbed to the roof, where he
could see by starlight the dark maze of streets beyond the receding torchlight of the
guardsmen, as far as the Old Wall, the settlements on the shore of a great lake, and on
into the black foothills of a distant mountain range. He had never ventured outside the
walls, not even in thought or imagination. Gaping, marveling, still shaking, Vincus lay
down upon the roof and looked into the wheeling constellations. There was a place where
the city ended. Vaananen had told him so, talked about the way past those faraway
mountains and into the desert. In the towers, all you could see was the city, and Vincus
had always believed that Istar extended to the end of sight, and that the end of sight was
the end of the world. The collar, now two slivers of silver moon, lay cold in his dark
hand. The breaks were clean, like they had been cut. Right through the letters of his
name. Dabbing at the cut over his right eye, Vincus held the pieces up before the
lightening sky, so that his name was whole again upon them. The metal was deeply notched
but for a hair-thin edge at both breaks. Let alone, the collar would have dropped off by
morning, long before he could have made his way to the gates. Now he understood the
druid's parting words. “The rules are broken. . . . You have served well, Vincus. Well
done.” Vincus smiled slowly and looked through the silver circle to the wide country
beyond the city. Here was a freedom and a country greater than any of his imaginings. He
would see if Fordus was real, too.

The Old Wall faded into the darkness behind him as the first of the lakeside camps came
into view. For a moment Vincus stopped in the shadows, baffled. The camp looked like
Bywall, or Westedge, or Piersideone of the sprawling communities of pau- pers that dotted
the shimmering marble of the inner city. The tents were there, and the lean-tos, the
banked fires, and the barrels set on their sides to house the poorest of the huddled poor.

For a brief, disorienting second he imagined he had somehow turned himself about in the
city, retracing his steps unknowingly. But no. Behind him was the Old Wall. If he stepped
back from the camp and looked carefully, he could see the outline of the ancient
battlements, the crenels jagged and crumbling like the rotten teeth of an ancient animal.

Through the camp the ragged people moved, dodging in and out of the firelight. Perhaps
what he had seen from the brewery roof was illusion. Perhaps the world was all city, all
Istar. All of a sudden the country ahead of him, glimpsed only fleetingly from the starlit
brewery roof, seemed like a murky maze again, its whorls and corridors leading nowhere.
And yet the memory of the lake, the dark waters and the vaulting horizon beyond rose
foremost in Vincus's mind as he passed from camp's edge to camp's edge on his way toward
the shore.

It is only an hour's journey, he told himself. I will reach the lake in an hour. But it
was longer than that. Twice in the early morning, when the campfires behind had settled to
ashes and the road before him lay at its darkest, he had slipped behind tents to conceal
himself from a passing squadron of the Istarian Guard. “Rebels,” they muttered. “Fordus.”
Once in the rumble of voices and rattle of armor, he thought he heard the druid's name. He
leaned forward, wrapping himself in musty canvas, and listened intently for more, but the
name and the noise and the squadron passed on into the night, and scarcely three breaths
later, Vincus leapt from behind the tent, running to keep himself awake and alert, his
hands silently saying an ancient protective prayer. It must have been prayer that
protected him on the last occasion, scarcely an hour before dawn, when a company of
Istarian cavalry rode by, their commander so lost in thought that he never looked above,
to the branches of a blasted vallenwood, where Vincus perched like some huge, outrageous
bird, newly flown from its cage. Finally, in the purple dawn, the tents and ruins gave way
to the cemeteries, the great funerary grounds that bordered the south of Istar. Now,
beyond the scattered white monuments burnished by the rising sun, Vincus saw shimmering
blue rising out of the darkness and smelled the waters of Lake Istarthe lake of his
rooftop vision. It is true, he told himself, leaning against a marble stone. There is a
lake out here, and there are mountains, beyond the buildings. And Fordus is somewhere
beyond the edge of sight. I am glad I kept believing. And he rested, free from fear and
Istar, for the first time in years. At nightfall, Vincus found the coracle Vaananen had
left tied to a willow by the lakeside. Slowly and clumsily, for it was his first time in a
boat of any sort, he steered the craft into midlake, where he circled aimlessly, rowing
ever more frantically as a distant bell tolled and the night turned. He could not be found
here in the morning. He had to get across the water. Now Istar and the mountains seemed
equidistant dark, looming forms against the darker shores. Worn out with rowing, with
spinning, with trying to steer by stars that ducked in and out of the clouds, Vincus lay
down in the coracle. Just a few minutes, he promised himself. An hour at most. When he
awoke, it was nearly noon. The craft had drifted to the far side of the lake, and the
foothills lay in front of him, inviting and solid and wonderfully, delightfully dry.

Vincus thanked whatever gods had taken charge of the water and the fools who ventured onto
it, and, giving the craft a kick he hoped would send it on its way back to the Istarian
shore, he scrambled up a narrow path and, by midafternoon, found himself at a great
heightat the mouth of the Western Pass with a distant view of the city.

Of the three passes leading through the Istarian range, only the Western Pass was free of
the sterim the harsh winds off the desert that seemed to gain force as they climbed. Had
Vincus traveled through either the Eastern or the Central Pass, his chance of survival
would have been slim. Vaananen had known, Vincus thought. Those hundreds of times he
rattled on about itthey were all for this. For by the time he had wakened on the southern
shores of the lake, Vincus was so turned around, so disoriented, that he was not quite
sure if the path he followed led to the Western or the Central Pass.

Then he saw gentian and edelweisshardy mountain flowers, but not stormfastat the mouth of
the pass. It had to be the Western Pass, Vincus concluded, and he set out through the
treacherous mountains by the lone safe route, congratulating himself on his newfound
mountaineering skills. Three days later, he emerged on the southern side of the mountains.
Thinking that the hard part of his journey was over, he trudged merrily southward, his
last day's food his only baggage besides the precious book.

As sunset overtook him, he crested a rise and looked down into a quiet, shadowy valley,
where felled and stunted trees littered a gray basin in the midst of the plains. To
Vincus's city eyes, it seemed like the area had been touched by fire or high wind in a
distant time; the dried boles of trees, already crusted with sand and salt and a
shimmering opales-cence, were a pleasant change from the grasslands' monotony.

Vincus lay down amid the sheared remains of a vallenwood grove. Branches of elm and willow
lit- tered his campsite, and he gathered some of them to build a small fire in the
twilight. He would travel by night from now on, he decided. It was easier, he had seen, to
steer by the stars and to avoid discovery.

With a smile of contentment, he rested his head against the blackened trunk of a willow.
All of a sudden he was weary, and his thoughts strayed over the road behind him and back
to the city. What was it called? Istar. That was it.

For a moment it seemed to Vincus that something was not right, that he should have
remembered the name quickly, more easily. But his mind drifted from this brief, pointless
worry, and he began to drowse. It seemed as though the collar was back around his neck.
Vincus stirred uneasily. The collar tightened, and tightened again, and the young man
sprang into wakefulness. The dead branches of the willow had closed around his neck,
gripping, clutching, and strangling. A rare carnivorous plant, the black willow masked
itself as log or tree and preyed on hapless creatures it lulled to sleep beneath its
spreading, branchlike tentacles. A child of the city, Vincus had never seen such a
monster, and when the willow grabbed him, he struggled vainly against its grip and his own
growing drowsiness. The plant seemed to sing to him, an eerie and menacing lullaby, and
despite his fright, the young man found himself listening. No. From his robe he drew half
of his silver collar, a ragged crescent that glittered in the moonlight. Desperately, his
strength and senses failing, Vincus sawed at the largest branch with the sharp metal edge
until black sap, sticky and cold like the blood of a reptile, dripped over the tendril and
onto his chest. The willow let out a shrill, hissing scream and, for a brief moment,
released him. But a moment was all Vincus needed. He rolled away from the monster,
snapping two thinner branches that remained around his shoulder. Springing clear of the
grove, he crouched in the dry grass for a moment and gathered his breath, rubbing the
long, fresh lashes on his arm where the pliant wood had whipped and cut him. He had seen
everything now, he thought.

The country itself could kill you. Forewarned and wary, he slipped the silver crescentan
excellent weapon, he had discovered back into his robe. He would make good on his plans
tonight, traveling sleepless by moonlight. Surely he would be safe as the desert slept.
Many months ago, at Vaananen's insistence, Vin-cus had scanned a map of the plains.
Meticulously, the druid had moved the small meditative stones in the rena gardenred
Lunitari representing the mountains, white Solinari the plains beyond. Slowly, precisely,
Vaananen had traced the safest route with his finger, and then, standing over Vincus, had
urged the young man to mind it all. Now, Vincus wished he had minded more closely. Was the
army southwest of the city, or had Vaananen said go south-southwest? Was the camp five
miles from the desert's edge or six miles? He could not remember. Vincus scrambled to a
little rise, a high point in the featureless landscape. Prairie stretched all about him,
endlessly and shapelessly, the warm wind rustling and rattling through the dry grass. Even
from this vantage he saw nothing but plains. Unless it was the floating shadow on the
farthest southwest horizona cloud, perhaps, or a mirage, but at least something amid the
sea of grass. Vincus shielded his eyes and stared long and hard, but he could see nothing
more than the shifting, formless gray. When the night came, it was cloudy. Solinari and
Lunitari darted in and out of the clouds, the only luminaries in a slate-gray sky. Vincus
knew that the tail of the constellation Sargonnas "was his guiding star, that it would
point him due into the heart of the desert. But glimpsed fitfully in the early hours of
the morning, the constellations seemed different, almost alien. Vaananen's neatly plotted
drawings of the heavenly maps were gone now, and in their place was a chaos of faint and
wavering light. The morning's red sky restored the east, and Vin-cus found that he had
turned in the night, had wan- dered due west on the indefinite plains. His hands
flickering a mild oath, he sat down on a small cluster of rocks and, chin cupped
despondently in his hands, watched the horizon shimmer and recede as another day of
uncertainty began. He felt famished. He breakfasted on the provisions he had brought from
Istar, and the grimness of his situation dawned on him. Soon he would have to forage for
his food, for meat and roots and water in this inhospitable coun- try. Armed only with a
dagger and a schoolboy's knowledge of edible plants, he faced even greater hunger in the
days to come. That is, unless the Istarians caught him. Vincus drew his new dagger slowly,
scratching idle designs on the dry earth. Istar and slavery almost seemed better now. A
sudden anger at Vaana-nen fluttered briefly through his thoughtsat that druid with his
intrigues and fond ideas. Fordus, indeed! Vaananen had conjured the rebels out of sand and
stone. They were no more real than... Than Vincus's freedom. He looked down at his feet.
Absently, numbly, he had sketched Vaananen's five glyphs on the hard, grassy ground. No.
He had come this far. It was then that the hawk shrieked overhead, and Vincus looked up.
Lucas had been circling for an hour, aloft on the morning thermals. His red feathers
glowed in the sunrise, and his angular wings tilted smoothly as he circled. His mistress
had loosed him to forage and scout in the early hours, whispering a song of return in his
ear. Over the plateau he had arced, then east over the Tears of Mishakal, gliding swiftly
in a low flight before gaining altitude and sailing into the grasslands, where the hunting
was good and the Istarian army ranged uneasily. The solitary man seated in the midst of
the grasslands was something new. For a while Lucas watched him curiously. Not enemy. Not
a soldier.

When the man took a small scrap of meat from his pocket, Lucas noticed immediately.
Noticed as well the jagged pieces of silver in his hand as they caught the sunlight. It
was something more than instinct that made the bird circle and call, made him skim the
high grass and pass not five yards from the seated man, his hooked wings banking
gracefully as he rose again, turning and returning, circling and calling, through all of
his actions urging the man to follow. Once in his motioning, the bird had swooped near
enough for Vincus to hear the bells on its jesses. Vincus stood and followed. The bird had
surprised him with its circling and cries. South and north it sailed, south and north,
shrieking as though in signal and warning. Vincus had laughed at the thought. Too long in
the wilderness, he told himself, when a bird becomes your messenger. And yet the bird
would know where to find water and game. For a morning he followed, the hawk never lost
from his sight. Turning and returning, its circles narrowing, the bird seemed attentive,
almost protective. Far to the west a column of smoke hovered on the horizonthe gray shadow
that Vincus had seen the day before, now obviously no mirage, but the watch-fires
surrounding an armed encampment. Istarians. Had he been slightly wiser, and hadn't needed
to follow the hawk, he might have walked right into their camp. Vincus shuddered to think
what might have happened. He quickened his step, searching the sky for the hawk that had
become his omen and guide. Seated on his horse, shielding his eyes against the sunset, the
sergeant watched the man trudge out of the foothills and onto the dry, waving margins of
the grasslands. A solitary wanderer. On foot. The sergeant nodded to his three companions
troopers, skilled swordsmen, and even more skillful riders. Dressed in the light brown
cotton robes and red kaffiyeh of the Istarian desert fighters, mounted on roan horses,
they blended with the brown landscape until, with the blinding sun around them, they were
almost invisiblemirage warriors on the high ridge. In tight formation, the four cavalrymen
descended from the high ground toward the trespasser, their horses breasting the tall
brown grass in long surges, overtaking him quickly when the grass gave way to rocky
flatland. The war horses' hooves clattered over the ground, kicking up stones and dust.
Nearly engulfed, the traveler turned, raised his hands, began an elaborate series of
gestures and signals. Mage! the sergeant's instincts cried. Somatic preparations! Since
the strange death of his lieutenant the one dissolved by the spells of a dark enchantera
month ago, he was wary of encounters with solitary men in the desert. With the quick
reflexes practiced over a dozen years of horse-soldiering, the sergeant leaned back in the
saddle, reined his horse to a skidding halt. One of the troopers, a young man named
Parcus, weaved and nearly fell as he fumbled to draw forth his short bow. “Move your hands
no more, sir!” the sergeant shouted. “Upon your life, be still!” Abruptly, the fellow
buried his hands in the folds of his tunic. Two of the troopers dismounted and approached
him. Parcus stared at the trespasser over the shaft of a nocked arrow. Vincus clenched his
fists hard in his tunic as the Istarian troopers drew near, tightening his grip on the
silver crescents hidden in his robes. The plains were no city street. Here were no
shadows, no alleys, no dark thresholds. Here in flat bare country and relentless sunlight,
there was no place to hide. He had begun to pray at the sound of hoofbeats, praying
ceaselessly until the bowman menaced and the sergeant shouted his warning. They would find
the broken collar. They would.... “Who are you?” the sergeant asked coldly, standing up in
the saddle. Vincus did not, could not answer. His great golden eyes never blinked. “Bring
him to me, Crotalus,” the sergeant ordered. The trooper dismounted and seized Vincus
roughly by the shoulders.