The Bone Queen (35 page)

Dernhil smiled. “I think it is more than that,” he said. “You can’t help the Bard in you. That girl you were teaching, I saw her face. What’s her name? Hal, isn’t it?”

“I was no Bard here,” said Cadvan harshly. “I made boots.”

Dernhil was silent for a time, studying him. “I think you are too ready to diminish your own good, Cadvan,” he said. “That’s as foolish as not acknowledging your faults. Worse, maybe.”

Anger flickered across Cadvan’s face, and then he caught Dernhil’s sceptical eye and laughed. “I’ll admit it, then,” he said. “I’m not wholly evil.”

“Merely arrogant, stubborn and irritating, but these are forgivable faults. Maybe.”

“You go too far, Bard.”

“Or not far enough.” Dernhil sipped his ale, still steadily regarding Cadvan. “One day I will present you with a careful and thorough dissection of your character, and you will be forced to see yourself in proper proportion. Neither really bad nor really good…”

“Indeed, I am the very model of blandness,” said Cadvan.

“You are many things,” said Dernhil. “But bland isn’t one of them.”

“And you think that this portrayal will be a stern lesson to me?”

“I have no doubt of it. It’s time you learned what you are.”

“And you think that then I will learn to forgive myself?”

Dernhil paused, suddenly serious. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Should you?”

“I don’t know.” Cadvan looked away. “Even if I could, I’m not sure I have the right. Others must do so first.”

“That may take some time.”

“Time.” Cadvan drained his ale. “I’m not sure we have much of that.”

Upstairs, Selmana sat on the rough bed in her tiny room, her gaze fixed on the latticed shadows the thin sunlight threw over the floorboards. The unexpected respite made her aware of her body’s fatigue, as if every string that animated her limbs had been cut: even the thought of standing up and walking down the narrow stairs seemed too much. The room was warm, and she had washed and put on clothes that weren’t stiff with sweat and grime, and the ease in her skin was delicious. After the enforced intimacy of the past few days, it was pleasant to be alone.

She let her thoughts drift. She had gathered, although she hadn’t asked and no one had told her, that this was where Cadvan had hidden himself when he had left Lirigon. That awkward, skinny girl… What was the story there? Her face had transfigured when she saw him, a blaze of surprise and hope. She had looked as if she were welcoming a loved brother, long lost… With a stab of sorrow, Selmana had a vivid vision of Ceredin at her table in her chamber, a slight crease between her brows as she studied a scroll, puzzling out its meaning, before she turned with a smile to greet her.

“Selmana.” Her name fell into her hearing as if it were spoken into her ear, but there was no one in the room. It was Ceredin’s voice. Selmana jumped, startled out of her abstraction. Please, she thought, not now, please let everything be ordinary, please let me have imagined that…

She blinked. The room still looked the same, but something had happened to the light: everything seemed drained of colour, every object seemed unreal, a ghost of itself. And then, with no sense of transition, Ceredin was standing before her, a slender form of shadow. Selmana could see the opposite wall through her body. She clutched the edge of the bed. The fur coverlet slid beneath her fingers, soft and warm and real.

“She is tracking you,” said Ceredin. Selmana didn’t need to ask who “she” was. “She can smell your spirit, your blood. She craves you, as she craved me.”

All Selmana’s sense of safety fell away. “She is tracking me?” Then the implications of what Ceredin had said struck her, and she stared at her in horror. “What do you mean, she craved you?”

The shade sighed, as if an unseen wind blew through her. “She sought me, even as the Dark sought Cadvan. She desired to take me for her own use. But she couldn’t devour me. Cadvan saved me that, at least…”

Selmana stared stupidly, trying to order her mind. Ceredin wished to warn her of some peril, and she must ask the right questions. But what were the right questions?

“What should I do?”

“Be wary, cousin. This World is not as that other place, and she sniffs around in the other place, now here, now there, trying to find the mark. The tissue between the Circles is broken, here a rip, there a wound. Here the borders are rent, here the doors will fly open. See, I can speak to you, even here… Be wary. She hungers for us, for we who have the Sight: we are the blood she needs to knit her sorcery into flesh, so she may tear open the wounded Circles and pour each into the other, and summon the armies of the dead…”

Bewildered, Selmana swallowed. A dark chord of alarm was vibrating in the deepest levels of her being. “The armies of the dead?”

“Already she is a torment the dead cannot resist. We can only flee and hide, and she hunts us down, one by one, and bends us to become agents of her will.”

A sob gathered in Selmana’s throat. “Not you, Ceredin, surely not you?”

“Not me. Not yet. But she is so close now. So close… And the dead are so many. Should she break the Gates…”

Ceredin’s form was fading even as Selmana watched. “No, stay!”

“I cannot. Ever I become less. Even in death I am a shadow. And yet I cannot depart…”

And then she was gone. Selmana stared wildly about the room, her heart hammering, a sick dread rising through her body. She had thought herself safe and hidden, but it was an illusion. Who could protect her? How could she protect herself?

Her fingers trembling, she unlatched the door and tumbled downstairs. Cadvan and Dernhil were deep in conversation at a table by the hearth, but they turned as she entered, the smiles fading from their faces.

“What’s wrong?” asked Dernhil.

“Ceredin…”

Dernhil drew her down to sit beside them. “A deep breath, Selmana. Yes. That’s right. Now, what’s happened?”

Selmana glanced at Cadvan, who was watching her, his face tight. “Ceredin just spoke to me,” she said. “It was a warning. She says Kansabur is close, that she is tracking me, she says Kansabur will rouse the … the armies of the dead, and that she can break the Gates.”

“She can break the Gates?” repeated Dernhil, paling. “Surely that’s not possible?”

Selmana hesitated, attempting to recall Ceredin’s exact words. “She said:
She hungers for us, for we who have the Sight
. She meant me and Ceredin, so Ceredin must have had the Sight as well.
We are the blood she needs to knit her sorcery into flesh, so she may tear open the wounded Circles and pour each into the other, and summon the armies of the dead
…”

Cadvan stared at her. “Ceredin had the Sight, like you?”

“That’s what she said.” Selmana brushed her hair back from her face; her tears had made it stick over her mouth. She hadn’t realized that she had been crying. “She said Kansabur wanted to devour her, but she couldn’t.” She breathed in again, trying to fight down her panic. “Nelac said he knew she had lost our scent, because I wasn’t frightened. But she hasn’t. That’s what Ceredin said. She’s been trying to track us, in the other place. She must mean the Shadowplains…”

There was a long silence. Then Cadvan spoke, his voice bitter. “I thought I knew the worst,” he said. “I had thought Ceredin’s death was the most terrible thing I could have done to her. But it seems I was wrong.”

Selmana impulsively took Cadvan’s hand. “No, she said you saved her,” she said. “She said:
Cadvan saved me that, at least
.”

“At least.” Cadvan’s expression frightened Selmana. “Well, that’s something, that she’s only partly devoured by the dead thing that I summoned into life…”

“Stop it, Cadvan,” said Dernhil sharply. “I too was there, and I remember how you leapt before Ceredin. You can hate yourself as much as you like later, but now is not the time.”

Cadvan met his gaze, and then looked away. “I failed. And now she is dead.”

“What matters is that we understand what Ceredin was trying to tell us.”

“Nothing good.”

For a moment, Selmana feared Dernhil would punch Cadvan. His lips tightened as he bit back a retort. “No,” he said slowly. “Nothing good. But now that we are warned, we might protect ourselves. Better to look at what we must face now, than to gnaw the past with useless regret.”

Cadvan stared into the fire, as the colour slowly returned to his face. “Aye,” he said at last. “You are right, of course. And now it seems we must save the dead as well as the living.”

K
ANSABUR
the Mighty, Tyrant of Lir. Avatar of Despite and Terror, Supreme Grace, Adamant of the Law, Regnant Jewel of the Northern Realm and Tributaries, Defender of the Truth, Absolute Ruler of the Dominions of the North. She had many titles in her centuries-long reign over the ancient realm of Lir, but the people she ruled called her the Bone Queen. They saw the fields where bodies lay unburied, rotting into acres of bones tumbled together under tangles of weeds. They remembered the pyramids of skulls that were piled as grim warnings to rebels outside her prisons and torture halls. Those Bards who survived an audience with the Queen of Desolation reported a Hull clad in sumptuous robes, eyes of red fire burning in a white skull, skeletal hands adorned obscenely with the dark flames of rubies. To those without the eyes of Bards, her sorcery clothed her with a beauty beyond the reach of mortals, a shimmering illusion of desire and dismay.

Yet even at the height of her power, Kansabur was but a slave. The Nameless One was said to call her his cat, and if he beckoned, she leapt to do his bidding. She feared nothing in her dominion: all her terror was reserved for the Black Hand of the South, the Lightless Silence of the Real, the Eternal Despite, the Nameless One himself. If she was cruel, he was crueller; her malice and cunning were shadows of his atrocity and guile. No matter how numerous her spies, how ruthless her armies, how rich her treasuries, how fearsome her prisons and barracks, they were toys compared to the deep-delved dungeons and factories of torment in Dagra. He alone had the power to humiliate her pride and daunt her malevolence. The Nameless One perceived her secret hatred and cultivated it, for it made her more cruel. She was one of his most useful tools. But as with all his minions, who worshipped and feared and hated him as the shadow and dread of their own ambitions, he knew that she would attempt to supplant him if she dared. He was careful to ensure that she would never, quite, dare.

Nelac lay on his bed in Jonalan’s tavern, staring at the ceiling. As he did every day now, he was running through the Lore of the Silence, thinking through everything he knew about the Bone Queen. Til Niron, a Bard who had escaped to the Isle of Thorold in the Great Silence, wrote one of the most famous accounts, which Nelac recalled as if he were reading it; she was one of the few who survived being brought before the Bone Queen at the height of her power. Was Kansabur returned as slave or absolute tyrant? Nelac found himself swinging one way and then the other: sometimes he was certain that she was but the forerunner, blazing the way for her master.

In Lirigon the records of the Bone Queen’s reign were extensive. Nelac had read most of them, grim though they were. The library held scrolls that dated back to the Silence, kept by Kansabur’s servants and officials: here, meticulously notated in brusquely written ledgers, were countless crimes: massacres of whole villages accused of rebellion; torture and imprisonment of anyone considered to be a threat to the reign of the Dark. A careless word, or even the testimony of a malicious neighbour, was enough to ensure torment or death. Nelac sighed, remembering some of the sadder entries:
Nokin, ten years, son of Traitor Kern of Skiln, confessed: death.
Behind those indifferent words were unimaginable worlds of suffering.

Northern Annar had been the realm of the Dhyllin, the people whom the Nameless One had most hated. The Dhyllic realm stretched from the Osidh Elanor to the Aleph River, and was famed for the beauty of its arts and the depth of its learning. Even the Elementals, the immortal Elidhu whom Bards distrusted as allies of the Dark, were said to gather with the Dhyllin, sharing their knowledge and delighting in the arts of mortals.

Most famed was the High City of the
Dhillarearën
, Afinil, which rose by a lake whose water was so clear that to drink from it was said to be like drinking light. Sometimes Nelac dreamed of Afinil, walking in wonder through its vaulted stone halls and hanging gardens, the star music of the
Dhillarearën
sounding through his mind as an ache of loveliness. Afinil had been erased so completely that no one knew exactly where it had been. Even the mere had been destroyed, its site lost in a maze of swampland. The fruitful country around Afinil, vineyards and forests, gardens and orchards, was now a haunted waste called the Hutmoors. Travellers went out of their way to avoid the Hutmoors: the land was poisoned still with the wounds of that war and the wind itself was said to weep with voices raised in endless lament.

The Nameless One had levelled all the Dhyllin’s fabled cities. The Light had been driven out of Annar, the Song of the
Dhillarearën
had withered and died. So much knowledge had been lost in those dark centuries. The Light could never be what it had been; the innocence of the age of the
Dhillarearën
, when day and night had been two sides of one whole, was gone for ever. The Dark was born out of Sharma’s greed and ruthlessness, his desire to possess and rule, and he had made himself the Nameless One. Now Bards were trained in warfare and combat, and their cities were walled, keeping a garrisoned vigilance against the Dark even after centuries of peace.

And even so, the Dark had found a chink in the armour. Nelac thought it was possible, even likely, that the Bone Queen sought to rule in her own right. But even if her remaking presaged nothing else, even if it didn’t foreshadow the Nameless One rising again in the south, it filled him with fear: if she regained her full powers, she had the strength and will enough to drown all Annar again. The White Flame, the Knowing of the Light, was kept alive in the Seven Kingdoms grouped around the borders, which held out, over all those centuries, against the onslaught of the Dark. If the Nameless One returned now, thought Nelac, his first thought would be to destroy the Seven Kingdoms. He would hate them as much as he hated the Dhyllin. But the Seven Kingdoms were hard to attack and harder to govern, jealously preserving their independence. The Dark would need to be strong indeed to think of crushing them. Annar, the largest realm of all, was always the weakest. The Seven Kingdoms had survived the fall of Annar once; could they do it again?