The Dark Queen (22 page)

Takhisis laughed again, more harshly as the pitiful creature tried to raise his lucerna
against the gritty blast. His hands clutched stone, mortar. With great effort, he pulled
himself against the Tower wall as the wind Shrieked and battered.

Like a fly in a gale he was. Like a straw in a whirlwind. So fare all who vie with the
power of a god. Takhisis watched contentedly, her low purr rumbling in the air like
thunder over Istar as the elf encrusted with sand and stone. I have vitrified him, she
thought. Only a moment more... Then, from somewhere far below her, imbedded in the depths
of rock and water and earth, arose a murmur, a cry of a thousand voices so deep and remote
that only a god's hearing could discern it. The miners! Takhisis shrieked and hurled
hysterically against the ancient stone of the tower, sand and salt rattling against the
windows. Then with a strange and urgent sighing, she settled on the cobbled streets of
Istar, pouring like sand through the cracks of the stones in a sudden and frantic descent
to the depths of the earth. The goddess was air and fire, salt and sand and glittering
dark light, and as she poured through the crevasses~of the undercity, she forgot her
victory, the dead reheL chieftain and his broken, abandoned bard, and the\ elf translated
into crusted, dried stone.

*****

Deep in the tunnels beneath the city, Spinel knew that something had changedthat for a
moment, and perhaps only for a moment, the chains of the Lucanesti were loosened ever so
slightly. The old elf crouched in the lamplight and whispered the last of his directions
to Tourmalin. The younger elf turned away, and raced with a handful of followers down the
deepest incline.

They would leave the mines collapsed in their wake, burying the fabled opals under a
hundred foot of rock. It would be decades before anyonehuman or elf or even dwarfcould
mine them again. Tourmalin had cleared the rubble of a hundred cave-ins. She knew how the
stones fell, how a slip- ping shelf of rock, an ill-guided pick, or a miner's spell might
collapse the whole spindly arrangement of tunnel and winze and shortwall until the ground
above them shuddered as the planet fell in on itself.

Jargoon, younger still, and a band of reckless younglings, would set pick and adze to the
new beams supporting five of the six adits to the opal mines. One lasfentrance would
remain, and the Lucanesti would use it, overpower their guards by sheer number.

Then would be the fresh light of moon and stars, and breezes the likes of which Spinel
barely remembered, and the smell of cedar and open water. With a wakened resolve that
bordered on hope, the old elf rose and made for the last of the adits. Sifting through the
layers of shivering stone, a dark sand tumbling through the porous volcanic

rock, Takhisis growled and muttered. The-least likely of saboteurs. A fossil of an elf and
his cringing people. Wluie-her eyes had been elsewhere, her powers diyerted: The dark
salts settled in a lightless chamber, then rose in an eddy of underground-wind, rattling
eerily against the porous rock, sifting and stirring through the subterranean blackness.
The opals were lost to her now, the mines caved in and closed to her slaves and minions.
There was enough of the glain dust to bring her into the world. Not in the form and the
strength she would like, and perhaps not for the thousand years she had yearned for and
craved. But fifty years. Perhaps a hundred. Enough to punish all those who had foiled her.
It would be enough. But meanwhile the Lucanesti would pay for the time she would lose. Pay
dearly and in kind, with the time they had remaining.

*****

Gasping for air in the collapsing tunnels, Spinel led a handful of the Lucanesti, mainly
children, toward a wavering lightthe last of the entrances, supported and protected by the
young elf Jargoon. The amber torchlight was soft, almost silky/ through his lowered
lucerna, and the children daneed at the edge of his vision, their dark robes flickering
like blades of translucent fire.

Somewhere below, Spinel prayed, Tourmalin was guiding the rest of the elvesthe most
skillful sappers and minerstoward thejsame entrance, the same faint source of light and
air. Breathing a last hopeful petition to Branchala, the old elf followed the dodging,
visionary light through the winding and crumbling corridors.

Sabotage had been easy. The Kingpriest had little regard for safety, and the whole network
tumbled in upon itself in a vast, subterranean chain reaction. Already dust was rising
from the lower corridors, and Spinel urged the younglings on, lifting a frail little
elf-maid to his crusted shoulders and carrying her toward the entrance and freedom.

“Where are we going?” she asked, and asked again as the corridor snaked up through thick,
glassy layers of obsidian. Spinel soothed her with a faint, musical cooing, reached up and
stroked her shoulder with a knobby hand.

He must protect these children. The fate of the Lucanesti lay in their futures. ^ Spinel
calmed the children, stepped over the body of a battered Istarian sentry sprawled at the
intersection of two collapsed tunnels. It was apparent that Jargoonjiail been hard at
work, and judging from the face of the poor Istarian, the elves had been enthusiastically
merciless. Holding his breath, the old elf rushed up the corridor, past another felled
sentry, and another. Now the entrance to the mine was fully visible, a bright arch in the
receding gloom some hundred yards away. Spinel quickened his steps. But where was Jargoon
and his company? Spinel looked to the side tunnels, all collapsed and filled with rubble.
There was no sign of the other elves.

*****

Long before the Lucanesti were brought to the caverns below Istar, before the long line of
Kingpriests and the city itself, a race of creatures ruled the intricate underworld of
obsidian and brittle pumice and ages of dark voldanic gems. The spiritvnaga had guarded
these recesses diligently, jealously, hoarding the jewels, the precious metalsany stone
that caught their depthless, glittering eyesand guarding their riches out of

sheer and aimless greed. When the elves had come, the naga had fought against their
invasion, and the nightmares of Lucanesti children were soon peopled with these monsters.
Enormous serpents with passionless, blank human faces became the villains of a thousand
elven legends, and every catastrophe from famine to collapsed tunnels was seen as the
doing of the naga. Most importantly, the beasts practiced a rough and villainous magic,
armed with an array of spells that blinded and stunned their unfortunate victims, so that
the creatures might approach them and, using a magic more ancient and despicable still,
drain their prey of all moisture, leaving the elves a mocking heap of opalescent bone.
Sinister and marginal, the spirit naga were a mystery to the Lucanesti, to the Istarians,
to dwarf and druid as\well. But nojt to Takhisis. Long ago the goddess had found them and
made them her minions. The time had come to deploy them. Now, an ancient naga crouched in
the shadows beside the last clear entrance to the Istarian mines, hissing with hungry
anticipation. The sinuous, scaled form flashed once in the rubble. It was answered by
another movement in the darkness on the other side of the entrance. Which was enough for
the old elf to understand. Two of them. And no sign of Jargoon. The monsters would make
short work of the children, here at the edge of freedom, unless ... How did the words of
the chanting go? It had been a hundred years since he used the spell, four hundred seasons
with his thoughts on tunnels and corridors and hidden veins of opal. Yet it was there, if
he mined his memory wisely. Slowly, Spinel lowered the elf-child to the tunnel floor. A
faint rumbling from the rocks let him know the naga awaited them, had begun their long and
treacherous incantations. “Culet,” he whispered to the little elf-maid. “When I tell you
to run toward the light, you will do so. It is a game we can play, you and I, but remember
to keep running when you reach the light and the wind. The rest of the people will
follow.” Two of the older elf-children exchanged troubled glances, andthe corridor filled
with the sound of a dry rustle, like something crawling over a century of leaves. “Do not
concern yourselves with me,” Spinel assured them, affecting bravery, confidence, hoping
his voice did not betray him. “You will follow Culet on my signal, and I shall join you
later.” May the gods grant that reunion, he thought, his gaze flickering over the stirring
darkness, the deep muttering in the rocks. Slowly his arm encircled the elf-maid. Spinel
guided her to the forefront of the company and, with a last, quick embrace, pushed her
forward and away from him. “Now!” he commanded, and the girl ran dutifully toward the
light, the others following. Spinel ran with them, his old, stony bones creaking with
sudden movement, and there, at the entrance to the mines, he turned to face the waiting
creatures. Mouthing an old elven incantation, Spinel stood in the opening, and a globe of
amber light formed around him. As each child, each youngling passed through the glow, it
was as though they were cleansed and delivered. Shielding their eyes, they burst into
sunlight and fresh airland a new, unex- pected life. The nagas, unable to penetrate the
amber glow of magic, groaned angrily in the darkness. Finally, the last of the elf
children leapt free of the mine. The light around him fading, Spinel prepared to follow,
but the incantations, faint during his own swelling magic, grew louder and louder still.
Blocking out thought, and will, and memory. Wearily, he took a last step toward the light,
and his unveiled eyes looked longingly at the rockface, a patch of green and a spray of
wildflowers in the midst of the black obsidian. Gentian, he thought. And I had almost
forgotten. The monsters slithered into the light, blockingxthe entrance, Rising and
arching, their pale, human>

faces expressionless, they chanted the last of the spell to the humped, opalescent pillar
at the edge of the cavernous dark. Spinel became one with his ancestors and the earth that
covered them. The Dark Queen hovered in the upper chambers of the opal mines. A black dust
whirling in the stagnant passages, she heard the rumbling deep in the ground and rejoiced.

What difference did it make that the mines collapsed? That the elven younglings had
escaped? Most of the Lucanesti were far underground, easy prey for rockslides and spirit
naga. As for the rest... They would suffer the most in her impending return.

For now was the hour, when the Kingpriest chanted and the glain dust, the godsblood,
filled with her fierce and abysmal life. This did not go according to her schedule. Had it
not been for that impudent ancient elfthe one who lay stony dead at the very edge of light
and freedomshe could have planned all things in her own time.

But now, the remaining opals darkly glittering in the depths of the earth, far from the
grasp of her minionsTitwas as good a time as any. And a time to demolish the twenty or so
remaining Plainsmen in the southern passes, the fool of a slave, the bard the lot of them.
As though a wind rose from the deepest recesses of the planet, the dark dust rose and
sifted through the cracks in the earth, merging into a hulking black cloud, sprouting tail
and talon and tattered wings in its headlong flight for the lofty parapets of the
King-priest's Tower.

When the windows spoke to him, clouded in smoke and approaching evening, their message was
urgent, angered. Now is the time, they told the Kingpriest. Your bride awaitsryou in the
collected dust. But he no longer believed the voices. It was fear that prompted his magic,
rather than hope and desire. Sifting the glain dust through his trembling hands, he began
the first of the incantations, his breath enkindling the dust, spangling it with a harsh,
artificial light.

I must not fail, he thought. Bride or no bride, I must do the bidding of the voice. He did
not notice the clouckpf smoke and sand until it surrounded him, pouring through the
stained opalescent windows and filling his chamber with a thick, choking haze. Then the
dust in his hands rose and mingled with the blinding air. You have done your part, the
voices proclaimed. I will let you live for now. He knew better than to ask for the woman,
the bridethe beautiful girl crafted of dust opalescent and promised him years ago by the
dark voice in the clerestory. She would not come. He knew that he had been deceived. Duped
and humiliated, weaker than he had ever imagined himself to be, the King-priest watched
helplessly as the cloud darkened and solidified and poured out the opened windows.

***** Emerging from the temporary stonesleep that had saved him from Takhisis's anger,
Stormlight watched from the foot of the Tower as a new whirlwind stirred on the balcony.
Dark sand eddied and rose, and within it the flat, opaque dust of the glain opals. The elf
saw three shapes intertwined in the heart of the cloud: Tamex and Tanila, their amber eyes
glittering with a strange, reptilian identity... And the other one, bearded and
long-haired ... The one with sea-blue eyes. The shapes were insubstantial, ever shifting,
sometimes indistinguishable from each other, sometimes individual and distinct. He
watched, horror-stricken, and he knew, as the sand and opal dust rose into an enormous,
boiling cloud above the tower, that his old friend was no more and that the fabled city
they had sought together was nothing but glittering, hollow marble. “Beware, Istar,” he
whispered, retreating through the streets toward the gate, the burning fields, and the
people beyond who were his care and charge. “Beware in the years to come. For the ground
is unsteady.”

Larken watched in alarm as the storm rose over the city. A deep, brooding shadow settled
on the tallest of Istar's towers, and above the marbled horizon swirled a shapeless cloud,
shot through with wind and lightning. Suddenly, the cloud took form and settled on the
spire, dark wings emerging from the whirling chaos. Now a tail, now a thick, muscular neck
and a strong reptilian jaw. With a cry, Lucas vaulted into the air. Wheeling once above
the mouth of the pass, he shot south ahead of the building storm. In dismay, Larken
watched him flywatched her people scatter in fear and panic. Now a dragon perched atop the
Kingpriest's Towera dragon of cloud and spinning sand. Slowly the wings began to flutter
and fan, and Istar Lake buckled and rolled as a fierce wind passed over it. The clouds
above the stormy image wheeled about it like indignant desert birds, and the air itself
buckled in sheets of violet lightning, in a hundred whirlwinds racing throughout the
northern sky. What is it? Vincus signed to the bard. Nothing. Nothing but a storm. But the
shape, Vincus insisted, his dark hands emphatic. It looks like ... Nothing, Larken signed.
Nothing more than sand and old malice. Then the raging wind rushed over them all. Far
worse than the sterim in the central pass, Takhisis's vengeance was swift and powerful.
The alder trees were torn from their roots and hurled against the walls of the pass. Their
crash and splinter and the cracking of rocks was deafening: all around Larken, the
Plainsmen sought cover, as the wind tunneled through the Western Pass, whipping down into
the plains and the desert beyond. Now, in the ear-splitting racket of wind, in the
breaking of nature, Larken took up her lyre. The wind buffeted her frail song back to her,
and, breathless, she stood in the mountain pass as the world uprooted around her. In the
midst of chaos, she found herself peculiarly calm. There was a passagea way past the
shrieking wind and the devastation. And she knew that the answer lay somewhere in her
memory. “Something perilous,” Stormlight had told her. “And altogether new.” She touched
the lyre's strings, gathered her last shreds of courage and hope, faced the stormy dragon
and began to sing. \ Fierce, driving sand clawed at her throat, and the wind took away her
breath. Her voice flowed through the lyre, inaudible above the clamor, and yet she
continued, singing despite the fact that no one could hear her, not even Vincus, who stood
clinging to her, holding them both down, his face averted from the driving wind. She could
not even hear herself. My song will not abandon me, she thought. It is the last thing I
have against this chaos. And I will sing it until the world breaks in two. So the song of
the bard warred against the shriek of the wind for a long hour, while a dozen Plains- men
huddledJix alarm and forks of lightning flickered through the distant wings of the dragon.
Twice Larken lost her footingonce she even fell, but Vin-cus's sinewy arms hung on to her,
his dark head bent above her trembling shoulder as he stood in the wind like a strong rock
in the sterim. Through it all Larken kept singing, sending all the verses and music she
knew into the relentless assault of the wind, composing new melodies with a wild and
reckless invention. Then, slowly, the cloudy dragon drew itself up and sailed high above
the Kingpriest's Tower. As it took to the air, a wave of immeasurable silencea last calm
before the final, strangling tem- pestrolled forth over the lake. The cloudy dragon
followed, a swirling figure of sand, its broad wings beating slowly over the dark waters.
In that sudden silence, Larken, still singing, discovered that no sound came from her
throatnone but a faint, exhausted rasping. It is over, she thought, still trying to sing,
opening her^ eyes and cradling the lyre like a sleeping child. I have done I can all to
stand against the beast. Then, in the flash of a second before her last frail note slipped
into fear and despair, as she held to