The Dark Queen (3 page)

whoop from the Que-Nara, the shrill trumpets of the charging Istarian infantry, and
finally the sudden clash of metal against metal as the armies closed and the first serious
combat began. Rising to his full height, Fordus peered over the whipping grass as the rear
guard of the Istarian army broke ranks and rushed to join the battle. He saw the enemy's
battle standards dip and nod as the last of them breasted the tall grass, bound for the
heart of the struggle. The cloud of wind-driven sand moved onto the field just as they
reached it.

Fordus chuckled softly. It had all worked according to his plan. In five minutes, maybe
less, the two flanks of his army would rise from hiding and attack the Istarian army from
behind. Assaulted from all sides, blinded and coughing, the Istarian soldiers would battle
surprise and chaos as well as his seasoned rebels.

The trap was baited, sprung, and closing. It was magnificent, clean and swift, like the
tumble of a well-thrown axe through the air. And it was all too easy. In a matter of
minutes, the battle was decided, though the sandstorm raged through the whole afternoon.

When the Twelfth Istarian Legion hit the center of the rebel lines, Stormlight sprang from
the rock- cloak and signaled his troops. The Que-Nara forces struck the reserves viciously
with a flanking attack. Armed with the traditional weapons of the plains bow and bola and
hook-bladed kala they tore fiercely into the unexpecting ranks. Reeling from the sudden
onslaught, the Istarians panicked. The legionnaires dropped pike and sword, shield and
broadaxe, and fled before the reckless barbarians, the fleet Plainsmen.

Fighting with no more weaponry than his hands and feet, Stormlight cut his way to the
midst of the Istarian ranks, the stony crust of his skin slashing arm and leg and throat
like a fierce, serrated blade. Spinning around a grizzled lancer, he felled a swordsman
with a crisp stroke of his hand. Two mercenaries rushed to meet him. He dove between the
baffled pair, and as they turned to strike, the elf drove his heels into their faces with
a quick, powerful handspring.

Bounding to his feet, Stormlight spun high in a circle, his right foot catching yet
another Istarian lancer in the throat. The man's javelin broke as he fell, impaling him
and finishing what Stormlight had begun. With a deep breath, the elf looked around. There,
on horseback, vainly trying to rally his troops, General Josef Monoculus caught sight of
the charging Stormlight and drew his ancient Solamnic sword to receive the rush of the
enemy. With a cry and a cartwheeling leap, Stormlight hurtled through the air, his heel
crashing against the side of the general's helmet.

With a soft groan and unfocused eyes, the Istarian commander fell heavily from the saddle.
Stormlight bounded onto the horse's back and, raising a broken Solamnic standard, rallied
the rebels to this spot in the center of the fight, laughing and singing an old
Abanasinian war song. The men whooped when they saw Stormlight rise in the fallen
commander's saddle. Descending from the grass-covered rise, they struck the leaderless
Istarians from the other flank, dealing quick death as they slashed through the
disorganized lines. From the high ground, Fordus watched a little absentmindedly as the
rebels and the storm closed like a vise around the floundering legions of Istar. He saw
the bird dive toward a distant cropping of high grass, an Istarian archer level his bow at
the creature . . . And then, with a blinding magic that still bedazzled the rebel leader,
no matter how many times he had seen it happen, Lucas vanished into a fireball, into a
nova of red and amber as though the sun itself had opened and swallowed the bird. The hawk
would return later, from the high air. It would bear stories to Larken of how the
Istarians had fled from the desert rout. In the wake of the golden flame, a rider in
Solam-nic armor burst free of the chaos, galloping north toward the foothills, toward
safety. Toward Istar and reinforcement, the bard's fingers snapped out inches in front of
Fordus's face. There is only one man who can outrun horses, outrun wind and light and
thought... Stirred by Larken, Fordus gathered himself again and loped down the rise,
gaining speed as he reached the plain. He struck an angle to the path of the rider, then
broke into an all-out run, blazing

through the dry grass at astounding speed. From the high ground, Larken watched and
marveled and chanted, her song weaving through the drum's swift cadence until word and
rhythm were indistinguishable, seeming to drive the heartbeat of the racing man as he
closed with the rider. When the Solamnic horse refused to hurdle the banks of a dry creek
bed, its rider had to rein the animal down the hard, sloping incline, losing valuable time
in the process. Fordus raced to the bank and stopped. Standing only fifty feet from the
Solamnic, he drew his axe and sent it whistling through the air at the struggling rider.
The axe drove home between helmet and breastplate. Without another breath, the man slumped
for- ward in the saddle, and the heavy Solamnic helmet toppled from his head. This was no
knight. All of fifteen, he was, if that old. Larken, on the high ground a thousand yards
away, saw the boy drop from the saddle, a shiny streak of red spreading from his throat
onto the sand. The drum head felt cold and alien beneath her fingers, and her hands
trailed off into soft, mournful sounds.

*****

The flanking attack of the rebels demolished the hapless Istarian infantry. By early
evening, when the air had cleared and the sand resettled, General Josef Monoculus, his
right eye heavily bandaged, stood propped between wounded Istarian regulars as he handed
his sword to Fordus Firesoul. No more than two hundred of the Istarians survived; the
prisoners would be taken to the desert's edge and set free, forced to travel the thirty
miles to Istar unarmed and on foot. The sand from the storm had already covered the dead.
Stormlight thought of the harsh trek across the grasslands and looked toward the defeated
soldiers. Some of the Istarians would not survive; hunger and thirst and exhaustion would
dispatch a small number, and wild animals and bandits would seize a few more. But even a
safe return to Istar did not mean that their ordeal was over. Many would fall prey to the
grashaunts, the strange insanity that came from too long a stay in level and wide places.
These wretches suffered from the delusion that the world around them was expanding, that
if they strayed too long out of sight of home or friends, the distances would increase,
and they might never find their way back. Such madmen would return to Istar, never again
leaving the close confinements of barrack or cubicle or cell. They would waste away by
their windows as they stared fearfully out into an uncertain world that was always
receding. It was true: Fordus treated his prisoners sternly. The road ahead of the
defeated legionnaires was the most perilous one. But not unfair. Indeed, the plains might
treat them better than would the comrades and leaders who awaited their return to the
city. Istar brooked no failure, no weakness, and what was defeat but failure and weakness?
Rubbing his arm, bruised in dispatching a rather large and thickly armored Solamnic, a
concerned Stormlight watched his commander. Fordus stared beyond the sullen Solamnic,
beyond the assembled, defeated Istarians ... to a point on the horizon no man could see.
Stormlight shivered. Fordus had gone again to that place where none of themnot even the
bard Larken with her voice and drumcould reach him. When the sea-blue eyes fixed pale in
the distance, sometimes all life would seem to flee from them. They glittered, then, like
ice, like cut glass, like the salt crystals rising from the desert flats, and there was no
warmth in their light, no heart behind the eyes' brilliance. What Fordus wanted, what he
looked toward, Stormlight did not know. “I accept the surrender of General Josef
Monocu-lus,” Fordus intoned by habit, the eyes of all resting rapt upon his windburnt,
impassive face. “And I accept the surrender of his legions.” He waved his hand
dramatically over the attendant rebels.

“And let those who lost dear friends,” he pronounced, “console themselves that the losses
were few and in my just and glorious cause.” For a moment his voice faded away, caught on
a high northerly wind and carried into the mountains to lose itself in thin air and
desolation.

Stormlight looked at his commander sharply. Console themselves with few losses? His just
and glorious cause? Now Fordus rose to his full height above the wounded Josef Monoculus
and his trembling Istar-ian supporters. “And at this hour tomorrow,” Fordus continued, “I
shall grant these men unconditional freedom.” The sea-blue eyes descended to the general,
regarded him softly, warmly. There! Stormlight thought with a strange and sudden relief.
Fordus is back among us. “Your arms will be ... confiscated, sir,” Fordus explained,
quietly and kindly. “You will be allowed to keep your armor and your provisions. Steer by
Chislev and the sunrise.” “I know how to find my way across this damned wasteland!” the
Solamnic growled. “Then find it with my blessing,” Fordus replied. He smiled absently, and
Larken's drum began a slow, somber march. The Istarian troopers guided their commander
back into the circle of his men, and mournfully, the defeated legion stacked its arms
before the inconsolable general. It would be the Games for him back in Istar. The doomed
gladiatorial struggle against barbarian, dwarf, and Irda. The fortunes of Josef Monoculus
had risen, had fallen. There was some moral here, some fable for the devout, the
scholarly. But being neither bard nor cleric, Stormlight climbed to the top of the rise
and merely watched the sun set, his thoughts lulled by the warm light on his face and by
the steady report of Larken's drum. Fordus sat in the shadows as the sun descended. A
barbarian youth, schooled for a year as the com-mander's orderly, untied his boots, and
Fordus reclined broodingly, his big hands interlaced behind his head. A song to cheer you?
Larken signed. There was a verse she had saved for this day, this victory, and she wanted
the last of the sun for its singing. “No cheerful songs this evening, Larken,” Fordus
murmured. The melancholy had come upon him after the armored rider had fallen. He had
watched the dead boy for a moment, the blood-matted blond hair waving forlornly in the
whistling, hot wind, the horse wandering lazily off down the dry creek bed. As Lunitari
rose over the grasslands, purpling the waving grain with a slanted, bizarre light, Fordus
brought himself back to the present. “I am tired of too easy,” he said aloud, and the bard
cocked her head alertly, reaching for the drum. “No songs about Fordus Firesoul tonight,”
he said. Larken nodded. “Sing of Huma,” Fordus urged. “He had someone to fight. Someone to
test him, heart and wit and hand. Sing of Huma.” Her small hands tapping the rim of her
precious drum, the bard began:

Out of the village, out of the thatched and clutching shires, Out of the grave and furrow,
furrow and grave, Where his sword first tried the last cruel dances of childhood . . .

Larken's was a soaring voice, a firm and powerful instrument that erased time and space.
Fordus closed his eyes and settled into the old story, which ran its course under the
bard's skillful rendering. “Those were the times,” he said, the song ended and the drum
silent after a last, fading roll. “The times and the great adventures. When the shape of
the story was larger than the lives of men. ”We have fallen on meaner times, Larken. The
great villains are gone, and the great heroes. Who will stand against me now?" They both
fell silent as the rising red moon streaked the tents of the Plainsmen. Overhead, in a
last circling- flight before evening, Lucas called and banked in the light westering sun,
amber rays still

dancing over the tips of his wings like mastfire. “Josef Monoculus was a fool,” Fordus
declared. “So are all the Istarian generals, all the fabled and fine Solamnic commanders.
But perhaps the King-priest ...” He propped himself on his elbows, stared eagerly at
Larken. “Perhaps the Kingpriest!” he said again. “For he is a mystery who stands at the
head of a great army. He is not only a manhe is a great and wondrous idea. ”And he speaks
with the gods, as do I. Or so the starians say.“ Fordus stroked his red beard
thoughtfully. ”I pray that he is worthy of me. A man must have great enemies when his
friends are small. If he has neither enemy nor friend to match his noble spirit, he is
straitened, imprisoned. Forced to grow crooked in confinement. “Without a worthy enemy,
the world is a damnable wasteland.” For a long time he scanned the darkening camp below,
and the sun sank from view, and only the red moon rode in the desert sky.

By day Fordus's world was barren, sun-beaten, a country of exotic colorsof red and black
rock and ochre earth and of hazy white salt flats, their crystals rising over the lifeless
landscape like frozen, abstract trees. It was a country of extremes and sharp edges, of
large sufferings and small deaths.

It was the desert night that Fordus loved most, especially when red Lunitari rode high
overhead. In the darkness, the desert was transformed. The desolate landscape deepened
with shadows, the salt flats glittered like discarded gems, and strange, nocturnal
creatures ventured out of the dried arroyos. The air became temperate, almost cool, and
sometimes a stray wind coursed over the dunes, bearing in its wake the faint whiff of
cedar from Silvanesti or salt from the seas south of Balifor, snaking over the flats and
the dry arroyos as though seeking water, or a body into which it could breathe its distant
life.

The night sands were Fordus's refuge and his school, his peace and his nourishment. And
so, after every victory, he returned to them. But this time he returned in doubt and
double-mindedness. His long robe wrapped around him, he dreamed. This night it was the
lava dreamvivid and long known to himthe same dream that had first come to him at the edge
of the Tears of Mishakal a year ago.

This dream had exalted him, lifted him from a destiny of water prophecy, a station of more
impor- tance than he'd ever dreamed or sought, and made him king of the desert. The dream
came as it always didevery detail the same as it had been the first time. And his
response, as well, was the same, as though he acted in an ancient ritual play, performing
an eternal seasonal role: Lord Winter, perhaps, or Branchala in the intricate elf-dramas
Stormlight had told him about.

As always, the landscape grew red and took on a fiery quality. Molten, volcanic, it
bubbled and boiled with a strange, unnatural vigor. In his dream, For-dus followed the
narrow, arching bridge above the roiling lava flats, and at the other end of the bridge a
dark cloud hovered, like an opening into the void.

Then the dark cloud unfolded. Black wings took shape in the shadows, and the cloud rolled
and kneaded like the hot lake below. Now the enormous black bird perched on the narrow
bridge, turning its dirty, featherless head to regard him curiously, eagerly.

I name you Firesoul, the creature pronounced, its words inaudible, yet strangely felt
along the

muscle and tendon of Fordus's arm. He did not hear the voice as much as touch it. “But I
am Fordus,” he said. He always said that. Fordus is a Water Prophet, murmured the shadowy
bird, steam rising from its matted pinions. Fordus is a nomad, a vagrant. But Fordus
Firesoul... Fordus smiled in his sleep. He loved this part of the dream. Fordus Firesoul
is the breaker of armies, the strong arm of the desert. The rightful heir to marbled
Istar. The condor flapped its wings, and hot fetid air, heavy with the strong smell of
creosote and sulfur and carrion, coursed over the bridge. Claim your own, Fordus Firesoul,
it murmured, and Fordus felt the words in the tips of his fingers. Claim your inheritance.
My inheritance? Claim Istar, commanded the bird. There you will find the source of your
being. You will find your origins. And you will discover who you really are. In the dark
of early morning, Fordus awoke reassured, satisfied. He lay amid the rubble atop the Red
Plateau, the highest point in the Istarian desert, as the eastern stars swam over him. He
was alone except for a solitary guard, a Que-Nara spearman who drowsed, in untroubled
oblivion, at his post. Fordus let the man sleep in peace. The sentry had earned that much.
So had all the rebel army. The short battle, despite the Istarian surrender, had exhausted
them all, had claimed the lives of many. They had carried threescore from the fields, and
for others, whose wounds were too great, they left blessings, full waterskins, and a death
watch of loved ones. Stormlight had come to him at sunset with the tidings. Two hundred
and six rebels lay dead in the grasslands. “Istar can lose three thousand,” Stormlight
warned him. “And three thousand again. What does the Kingpriest care for the wailing of
widows? But two hundred is a grievous loss for us.” Fordus sat up, draping his long,
powerful arms over his knees. The distant planets of fiery Sirrion and blue Reorx slowly
converged over the tipped cup of Solinari, the white moon. He wished he could read the
augury of stars, but the sky was opaque to him, for all its beauty. Who knew the future
from the shifting heavens? Not even Northstar, the tribe navigator. And the mysterious
glyphs Fordus had found in the kanaji, the ancient symbols that resonated in his thoughts
and stirred him to the strange poetry . . . that stirred the armies in turn? Well, the
glyphs had not returned. The wind had passed over the fine, soft sand, and the kanaji's
floor had remained faceless, unreadable once more. Four hundred Que-Nara awaited his
return from battle, pitching camp beneath the Red Plateau at the edge of the Tears of
Mishakal. Though their gods had told them not to follow him out of the desert, that
invasions and wars of aggression were iniquitous and wicked, they waited nonetheless. No
one deserted Fordus Firesoul. They would stand beside him in the sands when the time came,
braving Istar, Solamnia ... ... the gods themselves ... ... only if he, Fordus Firesoul,
asked them to. He thought of ungainly Larken, lovely beneath the grit and rawness, of her
mute, unquestioning devotion. Then there was Stormlight, to whom he had given a measure of
importance, and Northstar, whose confusion he had calmed. He felt a strange emptiness as
he stood above the rebel watchfiresthe barbarian blazes interspersed amid the muted,
efficient glow from the Plainsman camps like diffracted light on the face of a polished
gemstone. They would follow him, bandit and Plainsman both. But where would he lead, if
the sands told him nothing?

*****

Throughout her childhood, Larken had scavenged at the edge of the camps, companion to the
dogs and birds of the Que-Nara hunters, able to imitate any sound she heard, outcast
because of her freakish coloration and her constant vocal disturbances. Again and again
the Namers awoke to the sounds of dogs outside the tent, the dry hiss of the spring- jaw
and the underground rumblings of the spirit naga. Arming themselves hastily and blearily
with warding spells and the hook-bladed kala, they would emerge from the tents . . .

And find the little girl, singing all of these sounds uncannily into the night air, her
matted, tangled hair an eerie white in the glow of the campfires. Sending her away seemed
the best thing to do, so that she could be among her own kind. As her unusual looks marked
her as threateningly gifted, normal life in the tribe was an impossibility. Her parents
could hardly contain their relief at her departure. It was, of course, for her own good.

Her gifts blossomed in a foreign country. She had come to Silvanesti natively superior to
most of her instructors, intent and tireless at her songcraft. She rose through the great
Bardic College of Silvanost too fast for everyone, until she was above them all. Larken
readily learned the first eight bardic modes, the traditional arrangements of note and
rhythm that carried the bardic songs. She studied diligently and alone, as was her way,
far from the flarings of temper and temperament displayed by her fellow students. As the
bardic initiates, the high Silvanesti and the noble Solamnics, the Istarians and the
western elves from Qualinesti, bickered and plotted in the tall towers of Silvanost, the
girl sat by the waters of the Thon-Thalas, her knobby, callused feet submerged in the dark
current, practicing the songs in her harsh, flexible soprano. They had laughed at her, elf
and highborn human alike. Called her “churl” and “guttersnipe.” She ignored them serenely,
mimicking the sound of floodwaters in the quarters of discomfited masters, the chitter of
black squirrels in the vaults of the tower, which sent apprentice and novice alike up
ladders with brooms. All the while, despite her echoes and pranks, Larken's thoughts
remained serious, intent on the intricate bardic music.

By her second winter she had mastered all eight of the modes, mastered the drum and the
nillean pipes, and most of all developed and strengthened a soprano voice that, though
never melodious, never beautiful, left her teachers breathless, admiring its power and
range. Admiring, and fiercely resentful.

In the groves along the Thon-Thalas, where elf and human still mingled in green and quiet,
the sub- ject of her voice produced a jarring note of controversy. No student, the masters
maintained from their green solitudes, especially no gritty slip of a girl from the
plains, had ever learned the modes in only six seasons. There was foul play, no doubt some
hidden magic. It was not right.

Yet Larken learned all the modes, swiftly and readily and gracefully. Soon she tired of
the tradi- tional modes and began on the veiled ones, the intricate magical music that
dwelt in the gap between audible notes. She learned the first fourthe Kijon-ian for
happiness, the Branchalan for growth, the Matherian for serenity, and then, alarmingly,
the Solinian mode of visions and changes. At a recital, when her mighty voice changed
table water into snow, her teachers took the threat in hand.

In a ceremony usually saved for the seventh year, five green-robed bardsrepresenting
earth, air, fire, water, and memoryended her brief apprenticeship. They all said it was
for her own good, so that she could sooner return to her own kind. She received the
lorebook and her chosen companion, a young hawk she named Lucasan out- landish bird whose
bright green eyes, strikingly unusual for his species, promised that he could be schooled
to magic.

The next decision rested with the college: the instrument, to be presented to the graduate
by the resident bards of high Silvanost. Larken had fully expected a drum, since that was
the perfect musical complement for her voice, rough and rhythmical, the instrument of her
people when they summoned the water or prepared for a distant battle. Yes, the drum would
be most fitting.

But they gave her the lyre instead. How appropriately taunting, they mused. A chamber
musician's pretty little harp. A stringed dainty to be used to soothe some lord from his
day's troubles. An instrument of peace, a fine thing if in the hand of one who cared not
for battle and the rising of the blood and the clash of war. They had chosen her trophy
with a last, biting meanness in mind, and the message was clear: Be quiet, and be gone. To
ensure this, they consulted a dark mage near Waylorn's Tower, a Master Calotte, who, with
a curious smile, gave them the harp, and then loaned them his preoccupied apprentice to
burden the young bard with a binding curse. Larken could never compose an original melody,
said the curse. A talented mimic, she was sentenced to mine her memory for songs recalled
and half heard in a marginal childhood and in as marginal a stay at the bardic college.
But the apprentice botched the complicated spell. Nodding over the components, he mixed
one moss with another, then reversed two words in the long incantation, so that although
Larken was cursed to compose no original music, only her spoken words were affected,
discredited. That seemed bad enough, for whenever Larken spoke, she spoke discordantly.
Those around her thought they heard only the wind, or they forgot instantly what she said.
So her masters had promoted her and abused her at the same time. They set her on the road,
far from Silvanost and the haunts of the Thon-Thalas, bound in a last tutelage to Arion
Corvus, a master among traveling bards. When that was done, Larken was sent home, far more
angry than when she'd left. But old Corvus was wise, and knowing in the way that a bard is
knowing. At Larken's departure, he gave her the drum she carried nowa light, sturdy
instrument with a head of sheer glain opal. The drum was stone, and the sound from it was
muffled, even ungainly. But Corvus insisted that it was the drum for her. Muffled.
Ungainly. And useful, he added, a strange gleam in his ancient eyes. The drum is your
companion. It will protect you. Since that time Larken had wandered with the Que-Nara. Now
she was Fordus's bard. She had come to sing the cause of the downtrodden, come to stand
with him against the cold white rigors of Istar and its adamant righteousness, to free the
thousands of Plainsmen who wore the collars of Istarian slavery. She believed Fordus could
eventually break any curse, even her misplaced one. She was the muse of sand and plateau
and arroyo, taking the deeds of a rebel commander and breathing them full of poetry and
legend and light. Through her song and the thousand cadences of her odd glain drum, Fordus
the Water Prophet had become Fordus the Storm, Lord of the Rebels ... Fordus the hero.
Still, the curse of Calotte's apprentice stayed with her, and when Larken spoke, her words
fell into a great void. The result of this ludicrous situation was that she never spoke at
all anymore, except to Lucas. The hawk seemed to understand her words, no matter how
jumbled they sounded to human ears. Over the years she had invented a form of sign
language nearly everyone could understand, and she had learned how to write in glyphs,
runes, and common letters. All the while, the magic of her music grew ever more powerful.
Her song remained loud and clear and perpetually true, and sometimes it seemed to border
on prophecy when the marveling Plainsmen heard it at the start of a hunt or a battle. When
her song rose to prophecy, it was as though the desert blossomed, the arroyos filled with
the waters of the sung rivers, and the stars shifted in the winter sky, Branchala's harp
brilliant on the northern horizon. It was as though all prophecy resounded in its ancient
strings. They could not but choose to listen, then, from the most wretched tone-deaf
bandit to Stormlight himself. Even Fordus would turn to her and stare, with those sea-blue
desert eyes, and believe completely everything that she sang about him. And wonder if he
could ever afford to set her free. At the campsite the men were gatheredbandit and
barbarian and Plainsman, bound by wounds and dirt and exhaustion, their eyes fixed
restlessly on the heights of the Red Plateau where the Lord