The Dark Queen (12 page)

barren rock. Stormlight never remembered what happened after that. He thought he heard
Larken singing once, maybe twice, and Northstar shouting, and the distant cry of the
bard's hawk. He felt himself being moved, carried ... And then there was torchlight, and
shamans, and medicine women dancing attendance over him, and he felt the pain lift from
his arm and legs. Fordus, he told himself, Fordus is dead. His sorrow was not pure. In the
midst of the mourning, of the weeping, he felt something heavy lifted from him. At last it
is over, a voice said or seemed to say, and he felt a strange upsurge of joy, even in the
midst of his bereavement. Later, when he awoke at the foot of the Red Plateau, drenched in
rainwater and wrapped in cool hides, he tried to forget that traitorous delight. Northstar
stood over him, watching him intently. “Northstar.” “The commander is alive, Stormlight.
Thank the gods he is alive! Twice he has asked for you. Can you stand? Can you walk?”
“I... I think so,” the Plainsman replied, pulling himself painfully to a sitting position.
“He's . . . he's still. . .” Something tugged at the edge of his memorysomething he should
remember but could not, given the fire and smoke and the great raging bird. “His spirit
stands at the edge of this life, where the dusk surrounds him and the shadows stalk. But
he is strong, and we hope for his recovery.” Stormlight leaned hard against the younger
man, his eyes on the fire, the assembly atop the Red Plateau where Fordus lay injured,
perhaps dying. Slowly, with great exertion, he matched pace with Northstar, as the two of
them crossed the deserted campground and began the gentle, roundabout ascent to the top of
the plateau, where a throng had gathered and the drum beat a mournful rhythm. The
Branchalan mode. The mode of remembrance. Perhaps he was already too late. “Hurry,
Northstar,” he muttered through clenched teeth, and the young man quickened their pace.
“Five sentries are dead,” Northstar explained, as the sound of the drum grew louder.
“Gormion sur- vived, and Larken, and three of the bandits.” The drum droned on, and a
clear voice rose on the rhythm, the melody doleful and lonely. “Poor Larken,” Northstar
murmured. “A widow's weeds though never wed.” Stormlight stood upright, stepped away from
the young man's support. The memory, elusive in fire and battle. Tanila. “The woman,
Northstar!” he shouted, his strong hands grasping the guide's shoulders. “What hap- pened
to Tanila?” Northstar shook his head. “Vanished. No sign of her at the dunes or amid the
slag. There's a chance the eruption swallowed her, or...” “Or?” Stormlight was insistent,
shrill. “I stepped to the edge of the salt flats, where she was headed when Larken's song
began, when the monster descended. There was nothing there but the faint outline of a
woman's body, already half- vanished in the shifted sand.” “An outline? No tracks leading
away?” “None. Nothing but a smaller pile of rubble ... a heap of black crystal and salt.”

They had been forest at one time, these ranging caverns beneath the city of Istar. A
hundred thousand years ago, or two hundred, the volcanoes, now dormant and lying beneath
the great Istarian lake, erupted in the last of the great geologic disasters, before the
All Saints War of the ancient Age of Dreams. It had buried this landscape beneath lava and
ash, and the caverns had formed slowly, inexorably, beneath the rise and fall of a hundred
civilizations. The five races stepped forth onto the face of the planet, the House of
Silvanos rose in the young forest to the south, the gnomes were born, and the Graystone
formed in the divine forges of Reorx. It was then that the strange process of opalescence
began in the petrified trunks and limbs of the buried trees, and water from the new lake
hollowed passages through the porous volcanic rock.

Now, after thousands of years, living eyes marveled at the immemorial forest, and twenty
years of pick and shovel had not yet spoiled its eerie, unearthly beauty. In the smokeless
torches of the elven miners, the fossilized landscape glittered as though touched with an
ancient, frozen dew. Three elves descended the long, narrow passage between petrified
oaks, glowing amber lamps in their hands. They were masked against the dust, and their
green eyes flashed like stars in their ash- blackened faces.

This night, they were not searching for opals. Despite the Kingpriest's orders, all mining
had been set aside to search for the child. They had imagined her dead, along with her
mother and three other elves, when this part of the cavern collapsed two nights earlier.
They had sent out runners and scouts into the midst of the rubble, clambering and crawling
back into the darkness until they could clamber and crawl no more, calling the names of
the five missing miners.

Tessera and Parian. Gleam. Cabuchon. Little Taglio. Only a child, but old enough to hold a
lamp while the others worked. Just this afternoon they had heard her crying. Now, having
combed the most accessible regions of the mines, the Lucanesti had secretly sent several
of their strongest and best into more perilous depths, the realm of cave-in and rockslide,
and of the spirit nagathe serpentine monsters with the tranquil human faces, whose
spellcraft dried the opalescent bodies of the Lucanesti and left them dust and brittle
bone in the deep, forgotten corridors. Dangerous territory indeed, and the sound of the
elf-child's crying had haunted them for hours, as the three gaunt miners dug and scrabbled
toward the source of the sound. The oldest of the searchers, Spinel, held the lamp above
the younger, stronger elves. Seventeen hun- dred years had dulled the sharpness of his
eyes, the power and resilience of his arms, but the old elf was shrewd, tunnelwise, just
as aligned to the dark shift of corridor and passage as the dwarves he had fought for
centuries under the earth. He held the light in hopes of finding one of his vanishing
people. Once a noble, if minor, branch of the Dimernesti elves, the Lucanesti had roamed
the grasslands south of Istar, their keen woodsense transformed by their travels into an
uncanny discernment of hidden underground springs. Water in rock. It called to them from
its tomb in the dry earth. The Lucanesti had become essential to the early caravans and
migrations crossing the face of evolving Krynn. “Dowsers,” the wanderers had called them,
and hired them at great expense as guides and augurers. Dowsers. But they were paid well,
and the insulting name had become a badge of curious pride. Over the years, though, water
had become taken for granted by the wood elf and high elf, native to river lands and
watery forests. The scant influence of the Lucanesti dwindled. They were ignored at the
high council of the elves, mocked as vagabonds and ruffians. The old names returned.
“Dowsers.” “Hedge elves.” In the midst of such scorn and contempt, the opals came to them
like a favor from the gods. Water and rock, it was again, for those stones were formed
over thousands of years in which water and rock commingled beneath the Istarian mountains.
What it was that led the Lucanesti underground had been forgotten under the tide of
centuries, but the maze of cubicles in the opal caverns beneath Istar were evidence that
they had mined the roots of the city for ages.

And yet they remained a people of open country, of fresh winds and the high arrangement of
stars. Their sojourns underground were brief and efficient, the white lucerna of their
eyes attuned to the water in the opals, their digging precise. The mining took its toll
and changed them, their skin hardening with age and silica and water, until the old elves
were translucent, shimmering, opalescent like the stones they hunted. They used the change
to their advantage, masking their presence against intruder and predator, fading into the
rubble where they stood breathless, indistinguishable from surrounding stone.

When they were old enoughtwo thousand years, or maybe lessthe opalescence had its
inevitable way, and they entered the stonesleep, unable to return from the dark, encrusted
dream. But while they were young, there were opals to mine and riches to gather. And the
Lucanesti mined and gathered, bringing the stones back to the surface. Soon what had been
a poor and marginal tribe flourished with disproportionate wealth. A wealth that drew the
attention of cities, of the Kingpriest. Of the venatica, the hunters and spies in the hire
of Istarian clergy. Soon the Lucanesti were observed. Then accompaniedin what the venatica
called “the interest of geologic science,” though it was really an armed surveillance.
Observation and accompaniment changed slowly, like a stone in the swim of underground
water, and the elves found more and more of the red-robed Istarians as companions,
advisors . . . The “cooperative” venture turned into slavery one day when Spinel and a
party of followers made for the surface, for fresh air and light, but were stopped by a
squadron of Istarian swordsmen. The mining Lucanesti never saw the surface again. Still,
the Kingpriest's request surprised none of them, really. After all, relocation had been
the death sentence for a thousand innocent peoples since the dawn of the planet, and the
mountains and plains around the spreading, marbled city were littered with abandoned
villages, burned hamlets, and the moldering relics of swallowed civilizations. It was the
way of Istar to finish what greed had started.

*****

Now, in his waning years, the opalescence spreading and constant on his pale arms, Spinel
could only guide as his companions combed the rubble for the missing child. “I never
thought it would come to this,” he said. “Scarcely a century under the city, and the
children are dying.” Heedlessly, the two younger elves continued at their task. They were
spela, what the Lucanesti called the generation born and raised in the caverns under
Istar. They remembered no sun, no paired moons in the starry sky. Many, fancying that
their greatest enemies were the crumbling rocks and the nagas that lurked therein, had no
recollection of the Istarians. Spinel pitied them. They were as buried as the child they
sought. The older of the two spela, a young female named Tourmalin, held aloft a dark,
shining stone. “Glain,” she said tersely, extending the gem to the older elf. “At least we
will bring something home.” Reluctantly, almost ashamedly, Spinel took the opal from her
and placed it in a pouch on his belt. Another stone to crush into powder for the
King-priest's mysterious rituals. “We'll find the child,” the old elf asserted, his voice
thin and wavering in the torchlit alcove. “By Reorx and the lamps of the eye, we shall
find that poor creature!” With pickaxe and dagger, they moved slowly and delicately
through the ragged volcanic rock. The frail voice called to them faintly from somewhere
behind the baffle of stone and darkness, the child begging for water, for her mother . . .
finally, for Branchala and the Sleep He Brings. When Spinel heard the hymn begin, the low
bird-like keening that heralds the stonesleep of the Lucanesti, his orders became urgent.
Intently, his hand on Tourmalin's shoulder, he guided the three diggers through convoluted
layers of rock. Steady, he told himself. Do not lose faith or judgment or the faint sound
coming from somewhere

beyond that wall of stone. Barely audible, the stonesong continued. For a moment,
Tourmalin seemed to gather strength. Muttering a mild oath, she redoubled the speed of her
digging, and her companions followed her example, the corridor ringing with the sound of
metal on stone, the shallow breathing of the four miners. Yes, we are breaking through,
Spinel thought as the sound of the pick took on a new resonance. Only a matter of minutes
now, and if the child survives, if we can bring the poor innocent to air and light...
“Faster!” he commanded through clenched teeth. And then, Tourmalin's hammer crashed
through the last layer of rock. Exultantly, Spinel surged by his younger companions,
reached for the new passageway, his torch aloft... But another wall of rock, not two feet
behind the breakthrough, blocked his passage. He swore, scrabbled at the hard stone with
his nails, pushed madly against it with his shoulder ... As somewhere in the deep recesses
of the earth, the stonesong of the child dwindled. Spinel rested his forehead against the
cold, dividing wall and wept. The years would take the child's bones and transform them.
Someday, perhaps, descendants of those who dug for the babe in vain would find the
formsmall, curled, and glowing, in the midst of the rock that had swallowed her and made
her its own. “Opal,” Tourmalin breathed, the light of compassion fled from her eyes. Her
callused, pale hand touched the new, dividing wall. “Glain opal.” So they all would come
to glittering dust, in the heart o.f this indifferent place. Above the rocks and the
rubble and the sorrows of elves, miles away in the city of Istar, the Kingpriest's armies
watched and waited in boredom and uneasy readiness. The Shinarion approachedthe great
festival of gaming, industry, and trade, the great time of com- merce and coincidence.
Istar and all its tributaries came together to celebrate the glory of the goddess who, it
was said, watched over the vast, interwoven economies of the region. As usual, the city
was adorned with silk and gold leaf, the inns were swept and strewn with fresh rushes, and
throughout the narrow streets of Istar, everyonefrom the gray-robed, exclusive diamond
merchants to the painted bawds and nimble pickpocketsreadied their wares and skills for
the coming week. Even the Temple of the Kingpriest prepared special ceremonies in honor of
Shinare. Jasmine incense billowed in the great square, and the tower bells chimed in the
dawn carillon that dedicated each morning to the goddess. It seemed that nothing was amiss
in Istarthat the great business of ritual and trade continued gracefully and quietly, as
though there were no nasty, ill-starred wars erupting in the desert. The mourning banners
had come down in the noble houses, and the black cloth on the doors of the poorer
dwellings had been replaced by the bright reds and yellows of Shinarion. The fallen
soldiers, buried scarcely a week ago, were forgotten. But the guards on the walls still
watched nervously, the cavalry stopped and inspected all of the caravans, and in the high
temple towers a thousand eyes turned regularly and apprehensively south. There were rumors
that the rebel commander, the Water Prophet, stalked the city like a wounded lion. He was
coming, the rumors said. In a month's time, if not sooner. Fordus Firesoul was headed
north, torch in hand and wading ankle-deep in Istar-ian blood. His goal was the city and
the temple itself, its ornate walls to be ransacked and stained with still more Istarian
blood. For the first time in memory, the city was humming with the threat of invasion. Yet
the Shinarion would take place as it always had. So the Kingpriest had decreed. Daily life
would not give way to panic; the city would not become an armed camp. And the city would
profit, above all. Most importantly, the metal from Thoradin, the silks from Ergoth, the
grain from the Solamnic plains, would not have to go elsewhere to be sold. Already the
caravans had embarked for Istar, laden with expensive and exotic goods, and as the time
approached, the first of the merchants arrived and the first booths and bazaars went up in
the

rapidly filling city. By the end of the week the numbers would be greater still. Balandar
claimed that the population of Istar doubled during the Shinarion. Hidden by a carved
screen, Vincus watched the arrivals from his master's library window. As wine steward for
the Kingpriest's Tower, Balandar was busy all the time now, and Vincus was often left to
his own devices. He divided his time between secretly reading obscure manuscripts and
nosing through the crowded Marketplace, watching the preparations for the festival.

In most years, the arrivals were exoticalmost enough to make the young servant believe
that the city did not go on foreverthat the legendary lands that travelers described were
actual and true. The acrobats had come, and the fortune-tellers and dancers. A band of
dwarven musicians was expected on the festival eve, and rumors even had it that Shardos,
the fabled blind juggler, would attend and entertain.

But this year the first arrivals were somehow disturbing. Vincus wandered the Marketplace,
seem- ingly casual, but totally observant. The acrobats, huge and hulking, practiced their
stunts badly, the dancers seemed surly, and the fortune-tellers tight-lipped and private.
The dwarves and the juggler were long overdue and the young servant began to suspect that
the more famous, legitimate acts would not perform this year.

He saw few rehearsals, and the fortune-tellers' predictions, when they came, were
tentative and vague: Today is your lucky day. You are more insightful than ordinary folk.

Your future is bright. Not legitimate. That was it, Vincus was sure. The arrivals were
impostors. At first, Vincus was hesitant to bring up the matter to the druid. Vaananen,
preoccupied with his rena garden, had little love for acrobats and dancers they did not
suit his austere western ways. But finally, two nights before the festival was scheduled
to begin, Vincus slipped through the druid's window. Vaananen did not stir. He crouched,
as usual, in the rena garden, drawing a rairfglyph. The rena garden had grown, Vincus
noted. Vaananen had dismantled one of the wooden walls that kept the sand in place, and
now it sprawled onto the floor, spreading like a creature with volition of its own. The
druid had added another stone and a squat green barrel cactus to the stark, mysterious
arrangement of objects in the sand, and two new glyphs adorned the far walled edge of the
garden. Then Vaananen noticed him, rose and turned, his meditations over. “What have you
brought me, Vincus?” he asked with a weary smile. Vincus's dark hands flashed the first of
four elaborate signs. Vaananen laughed. “Impostors? Why, Vincus, all fortune-tellers are
impostors.” Vincus shook his head, his fingers a blur. Vaananen turned back to the garden.
“You have tried hard,” he announced. “Thank you.” Vincus shrugged, scratched beneath his
silver collar. Perhaps he was wrong after all. He rose and turned toward the window,
stepped to the sill... And climbed out into the close Istarian night, leaving the druid to
contemplate the cactus, the stone, the shifting shapes in the sand.