The Queen of Wolves (22 page)

Then, as he spoke, nearly idly, his eyes widened, and he pointed off in the distance. “Look there, where the light falls from above—do you see it? Her palace. Magnificent in those nights. There. There, my brother!”

2

A series of stairs led downward, built upon arches that were flanked on either side by public buildings of the kind we had just seen in the Myrryd above us. This led into a galley of sorts, although it had been more of an open square in the old nights.

From this we emerged into what would have been the evening light, had the New Kingdom not been built overhead. Above us, the arches that kept the New Kingdom from dropping down onto the Old, seemed impossible in their height, though from each arch, other arches grew at angles so that there was an arch for an arch for an arch.

In certain places of this sky-ceiling, water streamed down like a thin waterfall, and bled a well-worn path across a street, forming a narrow canal as it went. Breaks and rifts above showed flickerings of torchlight, and as we passed under these, the air grew slightly fresh but cold, while in other spots without such cracks, the air was damp and smelled of mold and rot.

Below, the narrow streets led to broader ones, and the canals made by the streams of water from above became wider and longer. As we passed one of these, I saw circling ripples come from a particular spot, and then another. I was about to ask Ophion what swam in such water when he reached over to squeeze my wrist, unwilling to speak of such things.

This city was crumbled and torn as if by some ancient war, and of it I asked Ophion nothing. The history of the Old Kingdom was written upon its fallen walls and the statues, which had been defaced and lay in many pieces on the flattened limestone steps of the temples of Medhya, which seemed to have been built every quarter-mile along the narrow labyrinthine streets of that district.

While above it was a red city, here below, the city was white; and though it was not made of caelum stone as Taranis-Hir had been built, the white stone had a similar effect upon me. It made me think of those I needed to find. The feeling of urgency again returned, and with it the sense that I was underwater as I walked on land—as if I could not move fast enough toward what I needed. Yet, I knew in that city, whether above or beneath, some secret would find me. Yet I did not think I had but three nights until the solstice would come, and I did not know if the passing of the solstice might be the passing of all hope.

The streets themselves were of a green glass, broken to bits and formed as an unintended mosaic beneath our feet. The air was thick with a heavy humidity, from the many thin falls that fed into the various canals generated over the many years from gulleys and culverts and the foundations of fallen buildings. I tasted metal on my tongue—as if there were bits of iron and copper in the moist air.

As we passed various openings into the ruins beneath the upper city, pungent smells assaulted us—from the overripe stink of human nests, to the sweetness of some aromatic flower in the stagnant pools among the tangled brown weeds that had grown tall and thin as slender trees along the canal edge.

“This is the heart of the kingdom,” Ophion said as he pointed to the place farther along, where, in the light that exists in darkness, I saw a great tower rising up, broken at its flank by the arches that buttressed the New Kingdom, a burdensome heaven over the Earth. “Her palace.”

3

Like a blind whore parading her wares before the tombs of the dead, so this palace with its ornate and gaudy statues, its countless pillars holding up its rooftops which were flat and broken at intervals along its rotted mile, its bone-white steps that led to its troughs and gaps—filled with the world-robbed treasures of priests of the queen—stood beautiful and endowed and brazen among the ruins of the Old Kingdom. The statues of the queen herself were headless here, torn off no doubt when the Priests of Blood and Bone and Flesh had sent Medhya to her exile. Thrown and battered, these statues lay on the steps, crushed to dust their hands and their breasts, and I imagined the moment when the conquering rats—from which my tribe descended—had swarmed and trampled the same art and treasure they had once polished and carved for her.

Her palace was too much to take in as we walked along its well-worn path, past the empty pools where once rituals of the priests had been enacted, past the chambers of the nobles of her reign, past the broken doorways filled with untouched gold and jewels, as if it were cursed to desire it.

Art adorned the walls in the form of friezes, and upon the ceilings faded images of wars and tribulations, of monsters that were like giant lizards upon the earth, of vampyres such as Ixtar and those of that lineage, with the aspect of jackal and bat and vulture upon their forms. So much color and movement seemed to exist in the barrage of images that I began to dread them, and then ignored them. When we found a room of gold, with chairs and tables and great long rows of golden flagons and bowls and plates and cups, I began not to want to see such things. It was a willful blindness as I followed Ophion. He spoke of what he remembered, and of how little had changed. Ghorien and his priests used the palace for ritual and torment.

But no one else, not servants or protectors, nor any vampyres “but those who are fools,” he whispered to me. The mortal rats did not enter this palace, for even in their memory, fear remained through many generations of such a place.

I felt its flow—not a stream, but a burning sensation, as if there were in its bone-white stones and golden rooms a smoldering ember behind, beneath, above, and around it. A fire had not been set here, and yet a fire was felt.

“I feel as if we are being watched,” I said, suddenly, and stopped at the center of a room that was shaped in an oval, with several doorways. Upon its recessed wall, as if a stair, there were urns and bowls filled with ash, and at its doorway, in the corridor beyond, a large brazen bull. Beneath this animal, an empty bowl in the floor, wide and long, and beyond its rim, the bull’s hooves were set.

“They put me in that,” Ophion said. He went to its side and reached for a small level, barely visible. Turning it, a creak and squeal, and as he drew the lever downward, the right side of the bull opened up. “Beneath it, they built a fire. For hours I lay in it as the metal heated. I began to moan and roar, and that is what they wish, for it is the bull roaring and not the one inside it who roasts. A mortal in such a device will die after many hours. But us...I roasted a night, and then they drew me out to sleep. Upon the rising of the moon, they put me in it again.”

“They must have been seeking some information,” I said.

“I had none. It was because I was Maz-Sherah. They wished to take away all I had.”

“They could have sent you to your Extinguishing. Why not that?”

He shook his head. “You do not understand the Myrrydanai. Their nature is beyond ours. For hundreds of years, they played such games with me.”

“They were looking for something,” I said. “I’m sure of it. They were waiting for something from within you.” Yet, despite speaking these words, I could not understand what it was Ghorien sought.

I put my arm over his shoulder. “My brother, do not be afraid. It is many years past. It will not happen again.”

“Yes,” he said, but as we passed down the corridor, he glanced back at the bull as if it were alive and might pursue him.

When we had gone just past the middle of the palace chambers, we came upon a door made of stone, sealed with wax of some kind at its edges. I did not need to decipher the words written above it in the old tongue of the Myrr—this was the throne room of Medhya.

I looked at the engraved faces of the two fierce creatures, one on either side of the door—their tongues thrust out as if in some bewitchment, their hair wild and tangled and flowing in an invisible wind.

I spoke the words I had memorized of the statue above: ‘“Above the door, her face engraved, her Gorgon sisters with tongues sublime.’ Look.” I pointed at the door’s arch. The stone had been chipped away. “They destroyed the engraving of her face. They did not want her here.”

I reached up to touch the face of Lemesharra to the right of the door. I ran my fingers along her eyes, down her nose, to her lips.

“What are you doing?” Ophion asked.

“It’s a code. In the rhyme. There is something about the faces of Lemesharra and Datbathani here. Something that matters.”
With tongues sublime,
I remembered. I touched the tongue of the engraving and it gave inward slightly. “Sublime—if the word might mean...something other than what it seems. Yet the sorcery of the statue’s words is that it would mean this...to me.”

“Mean what?” Ophion asked as he watched my fingers press into a kind of softness in the rock.

“Beneath the limestone,” I said. I sent him to the engraving of Datbathani on the opposite wall and instructed him to depress the softness of rock at her tongue.

The moment he did this, we heard the scraping of rock against rock, and the great square door grudgingly moved inward an inch, breaking its seal without our help. I guessed that there must have been a lever and gears within the stone wall—made hollow at its center, and our pressing these spots, marked by the tongues of Medhya’s sisters, had set off the lever mechanism.

The door stopped after opening less than a two-inch gap, but using our combined weights, we pushed against it, managing to nudge it forward another half inch. At which point the internal mechanism took over, and the door slid, groaning and scraping, to a wide enough gap for me to step inside.

4

Golden youths in silence serve.
The words became true as I entered Medhya’s throne room.

The great chamber seemed airless, and yet as we unsealed its door, a rush of air moved through it like a spirit—and flames came up from bowls that were held in the hands of statues. Twenty statues—golden maidens and youths with garlands in their hair—held these wide bowls, and within each bowl fire rose from oil. It was as if we had let the energy of Myrryd into a place that had been robbed of it.

These statues were not on pedestals, but set into the black marble of the floor, and were of varying heights as if modeled directly on specific mortals. The walls, also of black marble, caught the light through the door as we opened it. The torch in my hand reflected along the smooth, shiny marble. Something about these statues reminded me of the mounted bodies of vampyres I had once seen in Alkemara when I had first entered the hall of the Temple of Lemesharra.

The place had a great sense of emptiness upon entering, and I felt that it had been sealed from fear rather than care.

But now, with a hundred golden bowls lit by flame, and the smell of sulfur and burning incense in the air, it felt as if some living queen would enter it at any moment. I half feared that I had stumbled upon an entry to the Veil and that this would, itself, bring Medhya into flesh.

Yet, despite this fear, I walked down the aisle between the many statues. I had an unsettling feeling as I looked from youth to maiden. Their golden arms so perfectly imperfect. Their nakedness so well wrought, each detail seemed too lovingly created. Each golden young man seemed an individual with nose and eyes and chin and shoulders that spoke of specific lives. Each maiden, too, was different from the other, and perfect in the casting of feature and form.

I withdrew my cudgel, and with as great a force as I could muster, smashed it against the shoulder of one of the youths. The gold was more fragile than it seemed, and after a few such hits, the thin outer layer of gold crumbled, and beneath it, I saw human bone.

“Medhya did this to her own subjects,” I said.

Ophion, a few feet behind me, touched one of the maidens on the elbow. “Dipped in gold,” he marveled. “Molded. So beautiful and terrible.”

I turned back to face him. “You have been in this room?”

He shook his head several times. “No, my brother, not as it is now. Not like this.”

At the end of the room was a series of steps, bone white against the dark floor. Twenty steps upward, a platform, and upon it a great throne made entirely of gold, designed with serpents with their jaws parted, fangs jutting, as well as a dragon motif that encircled the throne and rose up to become the backing of its seat.

It reminded me of the many-dragoned doorways I had seen in the Temple of Lemesharra, at the heart of Alkemara itself. I knew whose throne this was without Ophion’s words.

“Medhya,” he said. “Before the priests took the kingdom and raised up new kings of Myrryd. She built this. She consecrated it. They used to say that in the walls of this temple, children were buried alive to protect her. Beneath the throne itself...” He hesitated, and covered his mouth like a child afraid to use a blasphemy.

“What is beneath the throne?”

“Poison, and those who had died of it,” he whispered. “Do you not smell it? Beneath the burning incense of the fires? I know of one thing there, but only from what I heard in the prisons of Ghorien. A flooded place, my brother, that is all. Sewers, where the human rats drink foul water and throw the bones of their dead.” His voice grew quieter as he added, “The nameless depths with its underworld sea and dark earth.”

I sniffed the air—again, a trace of sulfur, and some other odor. “As the old pythonesses would sit above the vaporous cracks in the caverns,” I said. “They would feel the inspiration of their gods. So she sat here, and the breath of this dark earth arose to her.” I crouched down, and felt along the hairline fissures that ran like the too-slender roots of some tree—these cracks were barely noticeable, yet it was from these that the odious scent emerged.
It is why they sealed the chamber,
I thought.
That no one would breathe in the air that Medhya had tasted. Yet, why do this? Why not destroy the throne or take it to the New Kingdom? Why leave these gold statues here? Why preserve this place if it offended Ghorien and his priests?

“She built her throne on poison, and her sanctuary with the bones of children,” Ophion said as he glanced from the floor to the ceiling.