The Hollow Queen (42 page)

Swallowing everything in its path.

“Run, Majesty!” the guard gasped, holding out his longpole futilely, as if doing so could hold back the rushing tidal surge.

Blindly, the king obeyed, turning to the slanted street and dashing up it as fast as he could.

He had only managed to progress a few steps, pushing futilely at the crowd of fleeing citizenry, when the air around him turned gray-black and the most sickening sound he had ever heard filled his ears.

A moment later, smashing water taller than his head engulfed him, drowning out the screaming all around him and sucking him, with an intensity far greater than his body had ever withstood before, first forward, dragging him up the slanted street, blind to anything but the overwhelming gray, and then rapidly back toward the harbor.

At least his terrified mind thought that was what was happening as he tumbled in the grip of the surf, arse over elbow, gasping and choking on water with no access to air whatsoever.

This cannot be happening,
he thought as the drawback dragged him down the street and into the harbor proper, pulling him as fast as a team of racing horses.
A moment ago, I was enjoying a fine brandy—

His head broke the surface.

Beliac's eyes had been pounded in the surf, strafing them with salt, so there was little he could see, even now that, for a moment at least, he was head-up in the light of day.

If he could have focused on the distance before him, he would have seen the wave continuing across the city, engulfing carts and horses and humans with ease, climbing hills as if they were not even there. But instead he was forced to take in the sight with his diminished eyes of the carnage around him, the bodies and barrels, horses and haycarts floating in the sea all about, a few living creatures still struggling, but most broken and dead, whatever eyes they had once possessed reflecting the glare of the blackened sun overhead.

The scene turned red a moment later; Beliac realized that his head was bleeding down into his eye.

And at the same moment understood that he had, in fact, survived the wave.

He set to righting himself in the calming surf, pushing wildly and unsuccessfully away from the flotsam and jetsam banging into him with each undertow, slapping back dead flesh and shattering wood.

I'm all right,
he thought.
I have been a mariner all my life; I can stay afloat, can make my way back to shore—

Something heavy slammed into him from behind.

Beliac lost his balance, floating in the surf, and was dragged momentarily under the surface again.

He curled up into a ball in the drift, struggling to save his arms and legs from being broken by the piece of the ship that had nicked him. Beliac held his breath for as long as he could; then, his lungs screaming, he uncurled and swam rapidly toward the surface and the light he saw there.

He took an immense gasp of air when he broke through, and kept reminding himself the rule that sailors used to chant when their ships were compromised.

Do not panic. Panic will kill you, even when nothing else wants to.

If this is not proof of my Right of Command, I don't know what is,
he thought woozily.
All about me is death; everything floating around me in the sea is dead, except for me. And yet, from this maelstrom I have been saved. It appears that I alone have survived.

Because I am king.

Again, something slammed him in the back.

Beliac curled up again, anticipating another contact with a broken ship that had been docked before the wave hit.

And, to his shock, felt a dragging on his leg, then a terrible ripping as it was torn off at the foot.

Numbness swept through him.

What is happening?
he wondered.

As a large oblong creature moved past him, a familiar triangle on its back pointed at the forbidding sky.

His lower leg in its teeth.

Beliac flinched, then began to shudder.

He looked around him.

In the swirling red water, he was surrounded by more of the triangles, circling menacingly, as the sharks that had been displaced by the wave righted themselves.

And sought nourishment.

As his lifeblood began to pulse from his leg, his darkening consciousness fought to remain alert.

No,
he thought desperately.
No—this isn't happening—

As another shark sank its teeth into his side, his wife's words from the night he had returned home to Golgarn rang in the shrinking consciousness.

Your childish obsession with being eaten alive by Firbolg has cost all of us dearly, Majesty. Welcome home. I hope your journey west was worth it
.

In spite of being the king of a nation proudly known for not having a state religion, Beliac began to pray, thoughts that made no sense offered in supplication to a deity or deities he had never believed in.

Just before the last shark seized his flailing arm and dragged him down to the depths in pieces, a final irony occurred to him.

The last picture in his dissolving mind was that of the tiny tip of the shark fin that had topped his
pe'detroi
.

And now was being torn out of the stomach into which he had swallowed it.

 

50

ON THE SKELETON COAST

Faron was growing frantic.

Day by day the place where his arm had broken off was crumbling more, leaving him off balance and weak. The dry, sandlike interior of his formerly smooth flesh of Living Stone chipped away with the slightest of contact, making the former freak-show exhibit feel as if he was dissolving.

Largely because he was.

In the first few moments of shock after the greenish beast had struck him with the rock on a stick, shattering his arm, it occurred to Faron that once he was free of Hrarfa, nothing was preventing him from going where he wanted and getting away from the demands of the demon that had rent his brain, day and night, with the endless call for more destruction, more fire, more blood.

And more speed in the achievement of her overall goal, the finding of the Earthchild in the mountains of Canrif and, in turn, the key to the Vault of the Underworld.

The overwhelming and relentless demands of the demon had made Faron long even more for the days he had spent in the company of his father. There had been comfort in the warm green water, comfort that his almost boneless body had craved. As each day passed and he became more and more brittle, all he wanted, above everything else, was to return to that time, and if not that time, at least to that sensation.

Which is why, for the first time in his life, Faron craved the sea.

When he first had come to awareness on the Scales, encased in this new, unwieldy, and uncomfortable body of Living Stone, he had panicked, had run from Jierna Tal down the forbidding mountainside, all the way to the shore, where he could feel some of the dragon scales his father had given him in a stranger's hands, a stranger who had stolen them from him when he was compromised, weak and dying after the destruction of his tank of green water on his father's ship. He had come to the water's edge, but had balked at going in it, terrified of the massive blue monster that had taken his father from him.

But now the sea no longer made him fear.

Now it was, perhaps, the only place where he might find the comfort he had experienced with his father.

He was able to run day and night, because his stone body required neither rest nor sustenance. All he knew was that he could hear his father's voice, calling to him lovingly from somewhere far away, all that he wanted in the entire world.

And, when he finally reached the Skeleton Coast, the fog and the water, the cool mist and the breeze that gently buffeted his missing arm all managed to obscure the giant and the shadow that were waiting for him there.

*   *   *

Grunthor waited in the shadows of the broken ships, partially buried in sand for a millennium and a half.

Rath had been tracking the titan from the moment they left the Bolglands, had kept silent while he was following the flickering fire of the demon's essence. It had been more difficult to track than even the most elusive of the F'dor he had followed in the past, largely because the creature that the Sergeant called Faron was so largely dilute, so clouded with other bodily legacies that the part which was dark fire was evanescent, hard to keep a mental grasp on.

And yet he did.

So when the titan was within a league or so, he turned from the silence of his meditative position.

“He's coming.”

“Yer certain?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then. Oi'll be ready.”

By the time Faron's shadow appeared, long and thin in the morning light, they both were.

*   *   *

Faron came to the shore, alone in all the world, it seemed.

For as far as he could see up and down both sides of the beach and everywhere behind him, he was the only moving object.

Gingerly he waded out into the water, feeling the soothing sting of the cold salt. It seemed to him that something was strange about the water; it was very far away from the shore, farther than he ever could imagine. On the wet sand of the beach, revealed when it pulled back, fish and crustaceans were flapping and moving awkwardly, struggling with their sudden lack of cover.

For a short while, the seabirds had a feast.

But then the world became quiet.

Disturbingly quiet.

*   *   *

And then Grunthor struck.

Hiding below the crest of the waves in the shallow water, he had been waiting.

Faron was caught unaware.

The Sergeant-Major lunged forward, throwing his arms around the titan's knees and slamming it onto its back in the surf.

Almost immediately the counterpunch broke his nose as his body was hurled into the air above the froth by the hardest impact he ever remembered sustaining from anyone. As the surface of the sea was streaked with his blood, Grunthor looked up to find the titan towering over him, the hand on the end of his remaining arm clenched into a fist that came down on his head, causing the world to go black for a moment.

Grunthor, woozy, felt around in the surf until he located his pick hammer. When the titan reared up again before him, he swung with all his might, nicking the statue's chin and breaking the area around its eye.

Blinded, Faron rose and slammed himself down onto Grunthor's head, flattening him into the beach.

His one good arm shot out and grasped the Sergeant's throat.

He squeezed, crushing the windpipe.

Until another swing of the pick hammer broke his remaining elbow.

Armless, Faron fell back, struggling to rise.

Grunthor, clutching his throat, rose shakily to his feet and readied the hammer again.

When off in the distance, something caught his eye.

At the horizon, the water from the sea had shifted, it seemed. Blood was gushing from a gash across his brow, but Grunthor was fairly certain he could tell what was coming.

He glanced around, but could find no trace of Rath.

The wall of water was moving quickly, sweeping broken ships and houses from the other side of the world in front of it.

The Sergeant-Major looked at the statue, panting furiously in the sand at his feet.

Then back at the coming tidal wave.

And, given the odds, decided to go for the kill.

He raised the hammer one final time and brought it down on the statue's head.

Shattering it.

Then, with the last of his breath before the towering wave swept in, he began to chant.

By the Star, Oi will watch, Oi will wait, Oi will call an' be 'eard.

He could see no sign of Rath.

He was waiting, standing vigil, when the wave crashed down, taking everything in its path away with it.

 

51

THE TOWER OF JIERNA TAL

The first indication Achmed had that the Merchant Emperor of Sorbold was on his way up the stairs was the slightest repugnant stench of human flesh in fire.