The Dark Queen (19 page)

“Come with me, Larken,” Stormlight urged. He shot to his feet as though at a call for
battle. Grab- bing the bard by the arm, he ushered her into the night, whispering a
warning or strategy that reached Vincus only in snatches, in fragments. “Against us” he
heard.

“Incarnate. Opals.” “Takhisis.” And “opals” again, the last word swallowed by the rising
night.

*****

So the stones that protect us will enable her to enter the world? Larken asked. Stormlight
nodded. “And if we deny her the stones, if we destroy them or hide them, we relinquish our
protection.” Together they stood in the twilight not a hundred yards from the fire.
Overhead, scarlet Lunitari reeled through the night sky, and the landscape, rock and
rubble and distant tent, seemed bathed suddenly in dark blood. What shall we do,
Stormlight? Her hands did not shake, Stormlight noticed. She was awaiting his command, and
was not afraid. His face softened, and for a long time the elf stood silent. “I am not
sure, Larken. Nor were the elves who wrote the manuscript. But the text is clear on one
thing. Whatever it takes to stop a goddess will demand our utmost. Something perilous and
altogether new. ”Despite our quarrel, Fordus must know of it. I shall warn him this
night.“ Without further word, the elf stalked off into the darkness, his destination the
level plain to the east, the largest circle of camp- fires. Larken watched as Stormlight
receded into the night. ”Something perilous,“ he had said. ”And altogether new.“ She was
ready. She had changed. She felt it now, with a slow certainty. Danger and novelty no
longer frightened her. Out of a strange solitude, she awaited the approaching change
calmly and with a new eagerness. Stormlight came back at dawn, a great heaviness in his
cold eyes. He had talked to Fordus, the rumors said. He had told the Prophet the news of
the discovered text. But Fordus had stared beyond him, into the nothingness of desert and
night. Had called Stormlight a dead man, said that his words no longer had life. Fordus
had rejected him, and it was Stormlight now who stood at the edge of the sea, a powerless
observer. By midmorning of the next day, Fordus's group had resumed the march, and by late
afternoon, they had reached the foothills of the Istarian Mountains. Stormlight's troops
still followed at a distance. Vincus leaned gratefully against an outcropping of rock,
making certain that the ground around him was free of willow branches. It was the best of
times to camp, he thought, before darkness fell in the midst of rough and treacherous
terrain. A courier came back from the ranks to Fordus's rear guard, to where Vincus waited
with Stormlight and two older Plainsmen, Breeze and Messenger. It was a man Vincus had
never meta young man named Northstarwho brought the word. ”The Prophet Fordus,“ Northstar
said, speaking the name in quiet and reverent tones, ”had a dream in which a dead man
visited him with a warning.“ Stormlight turned away at these words. ”The dead man told
him,“ Northstar continued, ”that Takhisis herselfShe of the Many Faceshas arrayed her dark
powers against the rebellion, against the Prophet Fordus.“ ”And what else did the . . .
dead man say, North-star?“ Stormlight asked bitterly, his back to the messenger. ”All the
rest was lies, says the Prophet Fordus. For Takhisis sends her minions to deceive, to
waylay

and destroy. Her army is the living and the dead, and none are to be believed. So says the
Prophet Fordus. "But the goddess is afraid now. Her warnings and threats are the words of
a beast in flight. For if she thought she could defeat the Prophet Fordus ...

“She would not let him know of her presence. She would wait, and hide, waylaying him when
he least expected, when he stood at the edge of his greatest victory, rather than now,
before the war has even begun.” Stormlight shook his head. Vincus tried to follow the
reasoning of the Water Prophet. Perhaps Northstar had not remembered it right, for it
seemed cloudy and formless, a poor and shoddy logic. Yet Northstar was ardent, rapt, fresh
from the presence of his hero, his lord. “We shall continue the assault on Istar,” the
messenger proclaimed. “Her threats are the banner of the Kingpriest's fear. So says the
Prophet Fordus. ”We shall march through the night, for speed and surprise are our allies,
and the mountains will be ours by morning. Through the Central Pass we will go, and let
those who dispute the word of the Prophet Fordus stay in their camps and cower. “We are
bound for Istar, and to us will the city belong!” Having spoken, Northstar wheeled about
and raced back up the column, his long strides eager and jubilant. Stormlight turned, an
overwhelming sadness on his face, and stared at Vincus. “ Tis the wrong pass, is it not?”
Vincus nodded, started to gesture, to explain that it was the Western Pass that was free
of the sterint, free of rockslide and shearing and the terrible destructive wind. But
Stormlight rested his hands on Vincus's shoulders and regarded him openly, honestly. “
'Tis what I told him last night, when I spoke to him and warned him. Told him that I had a
man in my camp who could guide him safely through the mountains if he chose to continue,
but that it would be far wiser to return, to go back to the desert. And it was no dream.
But he is no longer listening to me. He pulls phrases from the air, words out of their
places, and distorts them into what he wants to hearinto what he says those damnable
dreams and visions are telling him.” Stormlight turned away. Far ahead, Fordus's banners
flew aloft in the dying air, red in the sunset light. Already his columns were starting to
move again, and somewhere far up in Fordus's ranks, a solitary drum began a slow,
stumbling cadence. The new drummer was no match for Larken. “He is completely, utterly
mad,” Stormlight said. “And I have no choice but to go behind him and to fight his
enemies. For the time is coming when he will take my people into more than the weather,
more than the death of a few in a narrow, storm-swept pass. ”The walls of Istar are
coming. And the Sixth Legion. And Takhisis herself. And before Fordus rides out to meet
them, someone will have to stop him."

The Cental Pass through the Istrian mountains was and moonlit, littered with fallen
branches, with stones, with smaller, uprooted alder and fir. Despite Solinari and the
clear sky, the rubble in the pass was an ominous prospect to Stormlight. Vincus had warned
Stormlight, who, in turn, had tried to warn the War Prophet. Follow the Western Pass, they
had urged. But Fordus had not listened, had stared through Stormlight as if he were water,
all the while toying with the enormous golden circle that enclosed his neck. It bristled
with spikes that seemed to grow daily with his madness.

Now Fordus marched through the Central Pass at the head of his exhausted troops. Seven
hundred

had followed him before the Battle of the Plains, and scarcely five hundred survived it.
Seventy had fallen to the Istarian ambush, and a dozen to the desert eruptions. What do
you want, old friend, dear madman? Stormlight thought bitterly as Fordus's banner danced
out of view. Your forces have been wrecked, and yet you march. You cannot arm a legion
with promises.

By sunrise they were midway through the Central Pass, climbing through boulders and downed
pine and aeterna. Fordus's new drummer had struck up a song for courage and endurance. But
the going grew slower and slower as dawn crept into midmorning, and by noon, their hands
blistered and their limbs bruised and scratched, the trailblazers stopped to rest, and
noticed to their astonishment that they had traveled only a hundred yards in the last two
hours.

There was no magic, as there had been in Larken's songs, to help. Aeleth, his leather
armor soggy with sweat, wiped his brow and scrambled to the top of a stone out- cropping,
glaring over the rubblestrewn wasteland. “What do you see, Aeleth?” Fordus called up to
him. Aeleth thought before he answered. Suffering from shortness of breath, muttering at
the thin mountainous air and the countless obstructions in the path, the War Prophet had
become an impossible commander, short with his lieutenants and merciless in his quest to
reach the other side of the pass by the evening. Two men had fallen over dead from
exertion, and despite the urgings of the Namers, Fordus had left the bodies where they
lay. “It's .. . it's downhill from here, sir!” Aeleth called down. Heartened, Fordus
turned to face his followers. “Another vision has come to me!” he proclaimed, his bony
hands clutching his golden collar, fingering the dark glain opals. “If we march through
the night, we cover ourselves with the mantle of surprise. When we reach the shore of Lake
Istar, there will be nothing the Kingpriest can do to stop our advances!” The storm
charged upon them suddenly, rolling out of the south in a rumbling chaos like a herd of
horses. For a moment the air was still, and the hardy mountain birdsraptor and thrush, the
loud purple jays of northern Ansalonfell quiet in anticipation of the rising wind. Then it
surged through the pass behind them like a flash flood through a dry arroyo, the wind
picking up velocity and force as it barreled over the felled trees, over the rocks and
boulders, scattering sand and gravel and branches as it shrieked through the pass.
Stormlight turned around in astonishment as the wind roared past and over him, knocking
him to the ground and thundering through the back of his followers. Children were swept up
and dashed against the rockface. Terrified, their mothers screamed for them, their words
lost and useless. Stormlight covered his ears in the fierce, deafening wail, and a wave of
sand broke over them, stinging and abrading. Up ahead, a felled vallenwood launched into
the air and crashed into Gormion and a handful of her followers. The bandit captain
shrieked and rolled from the path of the hurtling limbs, scattering ear- rings and
bracelets as the wind took her up, buoyed her, and hurled her, alive, into a stand of
aeterna. The rest of the bandits fared even less well. The vallenwood branches exploded
with screams as the heavy tree crushed the hapless men against the rocks. Clinging to
Stormlight and Breeze, Vincus rode out the storm with his head in his hood. The pass
vanished in a whirl of sand, and from the murky cyclone ahead he could hear wail and
outcry. Occa- sionally a dark, unrecognizable shape rocketed past, and from somewhere back
up the pass came the skidding, too-human sound of frightened horses. Then, as suddenly as
it had rushed over them, the storm was gone. The sand settled lazily over the mountain
rocksthe desert transported by the fierce and merciless weatherand slowly, almost
imperceptibly, a few moving shapes emerged from rock and sand and thicket. When they all
had gathered, they were sixty less.

A new wailing began, the ancient funerary call of the Que-Nara rising like another wind,
echoing from the mountainsides. Plaintively, eerily, the cry spread through the Central
Pass, until even'the returning birds began to sing in responsethrush and jay in full cry
from the ravaged, wind-blasted trees.

But Fordus scrambled up the rockface, clinging like a grotesque spider, and waved his hand
for silence. It was a long time coming. The rebels were grieving, swept away by the dark
river of their own sor- row. “It is the vengeance of Takhisis,” Fordus rasped, his breath
shallow and panting. But nobody was listening. “Hear the word of the Prophet!” he cried. A
hundred pairs of eyes looked up at him, new fear flickering alongside their old devotion.
The rest of the survivors milled aimlessly, combing the rubble for the injured and the
dead. “There are a thousand roads to Istar,” Fordus proclaimed, his voice gaining power
and authority as the words rushed from him. “Each of those roads is guarded, with torment
and danger and hardship. ”But we have passed through the first of these hardships, my
people. And though there are some we must leave behind ...“ His gesture toward the
gathered bodies of the dead was quick and casual, as though he brushed away a fly. ”Let
them be remembered, and let their names be sung, at the time when we will remember all the
fallen, commemorate all those who spilled their blood in my glorious cause.“ Still
clinging to the rockface, Fordus pointed north, the collar at his neck afire in the
reflected light of the sunset. ”Their names will be sung around the throne of Istar, when
I ascend to the lordship of the great Imperial City. We will sing them in glory when I am
Kingpriest, set to the music of drum and passing bell. For the glyphs and the signs and my
own dreams have told me that the rule of Istar is mine. “You have followed my dream
through four hard seasons. We have sown seed in the bitter ground of the desert, in
obscurity and distance and sand, where all ambition was water. We have watered the plains
with our blood, and tilled in the storm-furrowed mountain passes. Now Istar stands open to
bandit and Plainsmen. My worthy rivalthe kindred warrior and prophet in the Kingpriest's
Towerhas met his adversary in the southern fields! The season has come! Set your hand to
the harvest!” For a moment the rebels fell into complete, astonished silence. All eyes
were riveted on the Water Prophet, all ears turned to his feverish, wild pronouncements.
“Hear the word of the Prophet!” Northstar shouted. A pathetic tap-tap, late and
halfhearted, accompanied his cry. “The word of the Prophet King!” the young man continued,
unfazed and triumphant, and to the sur- prise of the elders and the Namers, a voice deep
in the milling rebels took up the calla dark voice, neither masculine nor feminine, but a
voice that seemed to rise up within the hearts of all assembled. Another cried in
response, and another, and soon the young men, chanting “The Prophet King! The Prophet
King!” lifted Fordus atop their shoulders and bore him through the wreckage, through the
wide path that the wind had cut over rock and rubble and undergrowth. At the mouth of the
pass, Larken, Vincus, and a score of Que-Nara remained, as Fordus's compan- ions hastened
toward the lakeside road and the plains and city beyond. Her dark eyes distant and
mournful, Larken watched as the Prophet's banner was hoisted into the air, and the walls
of the mountain pass resounded with this new and alien cheer. “The Prophet King!” As the
cry carried down the column, Fordus's rebels picked up their pace. The weary trudge became
a brisk, revitalized march, as a strange, perfumed wind rolled through the pass, bearing
upon it the smell of jasmine and juniper, of attar of roses and spice and old wine. Istar
the temptress was calling them. Soft and feminine, conniving and poisonous, at sunset she
cast

her nets of beguilement. As Fordus and his followers ranged through the treacherous
passes, the seeds of another insurrection were being sown in the depths of the mines. Deep
below the city, their dead mourned and placed reverently in porous pockets of volcanic
rock, the elves resumed their digging. Exhausted, the sounds of little Taglio's cries
still echoing in his thoughts, Spinel guided his work- numbed crew into the dark recesses
beneath the shores of Lake Istar. These were the newest mines. No sooner had the mourning
ceased than word came down from the Kingpriest's tower to open them. Obviously, some event
above had changed the nature of the labor, brought a new urgency to this mysterious need
for the glain opals. By lamplight, Spinel examined the most recently discovered stones.
Judging from the veins of opal the diggers had found, the glain themselves were
youngyounger by far than any he had mined in his thousand years of subterranean labor. The
stones looked oddly familiaras though in a shapea formationthe old elf should recognize.
He knelt, examined more closely. There was something deep and important he was forgetting.
It was time for the Anlage. The lucerna closed over the old elf's eyes as he entered the
deep recollection of his people. Abstractly, he fingered the gems. He remembered the years
of mining beneath the city. The bright eyes of the Kingpriest's guards, the serpentine,
human-faced nagas, with their enchantments that dried and paralyzed the Lucanesti, the
wanderings in the Age of Might. Remembered the Age of Light, of Dreams, his thoughts
tunneling back into Starbirth, into the God- time ... Then he looked at the stones in his
hands, and cried out in horror. “Bones,” Spinel told the assembled miners. “The glain
opals, the special black ones the Kingpriest covets, are the bones of our deepest
ancestors.” Tourmalin frowned in disbelief, but her gaze faltered under the withering
stare of the ancient elf. “No, neither your fathers nor your grandfathers, nor the bones
of any in five generations of Lucanesti. But the eldest of the racethose who entered the
company of Branchala in the years before the ward and the wanderings. How could we have
been so blinded?” He extended his pale, encrusted hands. “Istar has blinded us!” someone
shouted from the borders of the torchlight, but Spinel shook his head. “Istar has used our
blindness,” he insisted. “Used our greed and our cowardice for its own dark strategies.
All the while, the Anlage was there for us, bearing this terrible secret. Why did we never
consult it?” His words tumbled into a long silence. Spinel leaned against the rock and
gazed out over the torches and lamps, over the glittering eyes of his people. “Blame and
punishment are not the answer,” he insisted, and othersthe oldest of the company nodded in
eager assent. “For years we have complied, have knelt in submission to the Kingpriest and
his minions. Now we must redress our wrongdoing. Regardless of the guards and venatica,
one road remains for our people. We must reclaim and rebury our ancient dead.” The rebels
reached the shores of the lake at midnight. Barely three hundred of Fordus's followers
remained. In early evening, Larken and Stormlight, who had been following at an unfriendly
distance, had taken a sloping path into the sunset, headed for the Western Pass and a safe
route back to the desert. Fordus did not acknowledge them. With North-star and three of
the younger bandits, he approached the lapping waters of Lake Istar, dark and spangled
with the reflections of a thousand stars. He knelt, recovered his breath, and stirred the
waters with his hand. The surface of the lake glittered with starlight and torchlight, for
the bandits had brought fire with

them, the better to burn the city. “With neither glyph nor interpreter, he finds the
greatest of all waters,” Fordus pronounced, an eerie laughter underscoring his voice.
Resolutely, he stepped into the water, took another step, and waded waist-deep into the
lake. Pensively he traced his finger across the glittering surface. “I had thought to run
to Istar,” he murmured cryptically. “Perhaps my steps would skip over the water, or the
lake itself would buoy me ...” “But we must travel like mortals,” he conceded with a
smile. “For all of you are my charges, my minions, my . . . celebrants. And though to
cross the water would be more swift, I would have to do it aloneto leave you here to plod
in your brave little paths.” He stepped forward, sank to his chest. “I choose not to
travel alone,” he declared. “At least not yet.” The drama that played out in the mountains
was small, insignificant compared to the large struggles among the pantheon of Krynn. Deep
in the Abyss, the dark gods felt the absence of the Lady. In the dark unfathomable void
they waitedZeboim and Morgion, Hiddukel and Chemosh, the dark moon Nuitari hovering over
them all. It was strangely restful, this respite from her chaos and torment. Oh, there
would be time to gather and turn on one anotherto intrigue and rend and divide and wrestle
for power. But for now they were content to recline and bask on the dark currents, to
recover and regroup their failing energies. All except one: the most devious of all the
evil pantheon. Sargonnas circled the void in a thousand pieces, his fragmented thoughts on
the War Prophet whose campaigns he had inspired and nurtured. He had been foolish, trying
to break into the world through the sands of the desert, but the knowledge that Takhisis
walked the earth and spoke to his minions, his Prophet, was too galling, too frightening
for silence and inaction. Now, fragmented and abstract, he spread through the void like a
cloud of locusts, like a monstrous contagion. There would be a time. He would watch and
wait. In her desire to destroy Fordus, Takhisis's attentions would shift elsewhere, and
there would be a time for him to strike. He would precede her into the world. His clerics
would build their fortresses of stone and lies. And even if they failed, he would spoil
the plans of the Dark Queen. His mind on vengeance, Sargonnas dropped a thousand miles
through the chaos, glittering darkly as he fell like a fiery rain. Alone in the rena
garden, Vaananen stirred the sand over yet another futile message of glyphs. The druid had
done all he could. And the hope that stirred within Vaananen was now the hope of flight.
Solitary and recklessly brave, the druid had remained in the city, gathering information
and sending it nightly through the white, decorative sands to a distant point in a distant
countryinfor- mation that could save rebel lives, perhaps ensure rebel victory. Absently
Vaananen rubbed his tattooed arm. His efforts had gone unheeded. And now Fordus stood at
the outskirts of Istar, and it was time for the druid to save himself. He'd tied his
belongings in a hide bag not much larger than the one he had given Vincus. Three druidic
texts, as yet uncopied, took up most of the space. For the last time, in the hopes that
somehow Fordus would receive the message, Vaananen scrawled the five glyphs in the sand of
the garden, beside the yellowed, rapidly swelling cactus. Desert's Edge. Sixth Day of
Lunitari. No Wind. The Leopard and the fifth and warning symbol the sign of the Lady
beneath the sign of the Dark Man. It was all he could do. The turgid cactus beside him
trembled. The plant, usually deep green and healthy, had suffered like this for days.
Three nights before, searching for rain, the druid had passed his hand just above its
spiny surface and sensed a tremor, a boiling from the center of the cactus, as though it
heralded a new and unnatural life. He had ignored it at first, and now he chided himself
for his negligence, searching his memory for a