The Hollow Queen (22 page)

With a ringing sweep she drew Daystar Clarion, pulling it forth from its scabbard in roaring flames. The intent in the grip with which she clutched the hilt was deadly.

She looked at the other two captives, and with a decisive tilt of her head, she silently commanded the guards to remove them from the proximity.

The soldiers quickly obeyed.

“From whence did you deploy?” she demanded in the Sorbold tongue to the remaining soldier when the other two men were out of sight.

“Sepulvarta,” the Sorbold said.

The vibration of his words rang false against her ear.

The Lady Cymrian seized the hilt of the sword with both hands and, two-handed, slapped the man square across the face with the burning blade, lighting his beard on fire. When he reared back, wide-eyed, she grabbed his shoulder and slammed him to the dirt of the roadway, facedown in the grit, where she snuffed the flames by rubbing his chin in the dust of the trans-Orlandan thoroughfare.

“Again,” she said, her voice calm but her body betraying her rage. “From whence did you deploy?”

She signaled to the nearest guard to flip the man over onto his back.

She stared down into his face; it was striped with tears of terror. Her expression of anger receded, and her aspect became thoughtful. She bent down on one knee and leaned over the supine man, looking directly into his eyes.

“You will tell me the truth,” she said softly, the tone of True-Speaking in her voice.

“You are—demon,” the man whispered. “Painfully beautiful, but with an evil heart.”

A small smile took up residence on the Lady's face.

“Had I been a demon, I would have slashed you across the eyes horizontally instead of slapping you with the blunt edge of my blade,” she whispered in return. “I would have let your face burn off and enjoyed listening to you scream, rather than snuffing the fire. I would have eaten your soul, but I assure you, if you had one when you crossed the border, you still do. It is you who are trespassing in my lands, not I in yours.
From whence did you deploy?
”

Something in her gaze was so intense
,
so compelling, that the soldier staring into her eyes felt as if he were looking directly into a roaring inferno. Against his will, a word formed on his lips and spilled out.

“Mvekgurn,” he said.

Rhapsody blinked. “Mvekgurn?” she demanded. “You came in through the Hintervold?”

The man nodded weakly.

The Lady Cymrian looked up at Knapp and the commanders, whose faces bore all varying degrees of shock. Her stare returned to the Sorbold on the ground at her feet.

“How many? How many are coming?”

“I—I—”

The ancient sword of fire and ether was at his throat.
“How many?”

“Thirty thousand Icemen,” the Sorbold soldier whispered.

“How many men of the Sun?”

“I do not know.”

The tiniest hint of a smile came back to the corners of her mouth. The Sorbold soldier's body stiffened on the ground.

“I don't believe you,” the Lady Cymrian said softly. “One more time—how many men of the Sun?”

The swarthy man swallowed.

“I—do not know many details,” he said in the harsh language of his nation. “But I heard Titactyk say that he was commanding one hundred and twenty thousand men.”

For a moment the only sound on the thoroughfare was the ripple of a light wind.

The Lady Cymrian looked at him thoughtfully a moment longer, then nodded. She patted his face gently.

“Sorry about the beard,” she said. “I do hope it will grow back quickly.”

Knapp cocked his head. The guards seized the Sorbold and took him into the lines of the caravan. The Lady Cymrian returned to her horse and mounted again.

“Well, that's unfortunate,” commented Decken, one of the field commanders assigned to her battalion.

“I wonder where Talquist has been quartering them,” Knapp said, as if to himself.

“Perhaps he transported them on the blockade ships, and dropped them off in the north on their last seemingly legitimate run before the assaults,” Rhapsody suggested. “Let's get on to the capital city; time is even more of the essence than it was a few moments ago.”

*   *   *

When they arrived at the western gate of the city's edge, Rhapsody signaled to Knapp, indicating that she wanted him to follow her off the road a short way from the rest of the regiment. The First Generation Cymrian had not spoken even once during the remainder of the journey, but silently nodded and obeyed.

When the noise had receded enough to hear, she took off her helm and ran her fingers through her short hair, clearing it of sweat and tangles.

“I am not certain what I have done to annoy you, Knapp,” she said directly. “You have been very withdrawn and short with me, even more so than usual, since we left Canderre. If you are displeased with Anborn assigning you to serve with me, I'm sorry about that, but—”

The ancient soldier looked suddenly older.

“Not at all, m'lady,” he said stiffly. “It is to you that I must apologize.”

“For what? I certainly take no offense at my comrades being quiet or short—it's a vast improvement over what I get from my Firbolg friends. I just want to make certain we are not carrying silent problems around when we are about to be defending our Alliance's capital.”

Knapp looked away. Then he sighed and met her gaze again.

“In the old world, being a human soldier, I occasionally took part in that custom you mentioned back in Canderre,” he said quietly. “The, er, harvesting of Lirin women's—I am sorry, m'lady. I hope you will forgive me.”

Rhapsody did not blink, but absorbed his words.

“Do you remember me? From that time?”

Knapp looked away again. “No, indeed,” he said stonily. “If I ever saw—someone's face, I don't remember it; I tend to recall that I never did.”

She nodded. “Is that all?”

Knapp looked back at her in surprise. “All?”

“Is there anything else bothering you?”

“No, m'lady—I am, well, have not thought about those days in more than a millennium, I am ashamed to say.”

She nodded. “Very well. Let us get back to the regiment.” She took the reins in hand and clicked to the warhorse.

Knapp sat up in surprise. “M'lady?”

“Yes?”

“Can—you see fit to forgive me? Whether it was you or not?”

Rhapsody exhaled.

“No,” she said shortly. “I've forgotten how. If it consoles you, Knapp, I probably left the Island long before you were born. If it doesn't, ask me again after the war, if we both survive, and if it still matters to you. I will probably need to know how to forgive myself for things I've done as a soldier by then as well.”

She clicked to the animal again and made her way back to the first rank of the regiment, Knapp a few heartbeats behind.

As the battalion set off into the capital city, the Third Armored Garrison of what Anborn had named the First Front.

THE IRON MINES, VORNESSTA, SORBOLD

The monstrous caverns of the volcanic deposit in which countless slaves toiled without ceasing were ringing in the unending cacophony of hammers and diamond-edged trowels, the maddening noise vibrating through Evrit's blood. Evrit had long become accustomed to that cacophony, having been surrounded by it for so long he could not remember what quiet actually felt like.

He was one of those slaves, taken with his family in the wake of a shipwreck into different places of servitude, his older son and he to this place of endless noise, the iron mines of Vornessta.

Talking during work hours, which comprised all but four in each day, was strictly forbidden, so Evrit had learned little of the geography of Sorbold; he had no idea where in the world he was. Sometimes when he was curled up against the wall of the sleeping tunnel, just before he would fall into an unconscious state, the ever-present noise more distant but still vibrating in his skin, he would pray to the God he was no longer certain he believed in to show him, just once, an image of his wife or his younger son, even if it was only in a dream.

Apparently that God could no longer hear his unspoken prayers over the pandemonium in which Evrit existed now.

But, in spite of the inevitability of a bad ending, Evrit had hope.

Sometime before, how long it had been he could not even begin to fathom, a lashman had hovered over him, whip in hand, and had dragged him from his place along the wall of ore up to within a handsbreadth of the man's mouth. While the rest of the slaves on the wall beside him skittered away in fear, the guard had whispered words in the language of Marincaer, his homeland, words that Evrit now repeated in his mind with every waking breath.

Fear not, friend, your liberty is coming. Be ready when the call comes to fight. Tell no one else. For what I must do now, I apologize
.

Unconsciously, Evrit's hand went to his neck now, where a thin scar remained that the lashman's whip had drawn in blood.

Ever since that day, Evrit thought he had noticed glances between his fellow slaves and the guards, but having been a gentle tailor and the leader of an even more gentle religious sect called the Blessed in his former life, with no understanding of the practices of war or self-defense, he had no real way to gauge if those exchanges were meaningful or not.

He rose painfully at the foreman's whistle with his scuttle of ore and joined the line of his fellow slaves making their way to the enormous wheeled bins along the track from the smelting fires. The slag from the forges that had been sent up from below had been off-loaded into what could only rightfully be called a mountain of rock waste that towered to the ceiling of the enormous cavern. The bins were now empty again, awaiting the fruit of Evrit and his cave fellows' work.

One by one they tossed their scrapings over the edge into the wheeled bins two levels below and moved hurriedly back to the deposit wall under the eyes of their guards.

On his way back to the wall Evrit cast one last quick glance at the mountain of slag. When he first had been brought to the cave where he and hundreds of other slaves spent their days, one of dozens on that level, with dozens more on levels above and below him, he had heard several of the guards discussing the slag pile, which even then had reached to three-quarters or more of the height of the dome of the vast cavern. The tongue of the Sorbolds was a difficult one to learn, but Evrit had always had a capacity with language, being in the trade, and he felt certain he heard the men make humorous reference to the fact that the only exit doors out of the mine, other than the ones they had entered in at the base of the mountain range, were behind the towering pile of slag.

At least we never have to worry about escape.

In his time working in the mine, the mountain of slag had grown at least ten times thicker and had reached the top of the dome. It was a constant visual reminder of how and where their servitude would end, if anyone had ever thought to believe otherwise.

As he picked up his trowel again, Evrit looked furtively around at the guards and the lashmen. It seemed to him that the men with the whips were largely new, but it was hard to be certain in the dark of the sweat-filled cave. Any direct eye contact was punishable with the lash, so keeping one's eyes averted was a basic survival skill.

He was almost certain, however, that he saw the guard at the opening of the cave in which he was toiling nod to him, then turn away again.

Evrit returned to scratching ore, trying not to let his hope become too entrenched. That was the only thing that could completely crush the fragile resolve he had nurtured to survive long enough to find his family again.

 

23

THE OPEN SEA, BETWEEN GAEMATRIA AND MANOSSE

How many days and nights Ashe had walked the waves between Gaematria and Manosse he no longer knew. He'd found it quicker and easier to travel the depths in the heavier water of the Twilight Realm, where the drift was minimal and the wake of a ship or a particularly large breaker did not drag his vaporous form off course. His mind was still reeling at what he could not help but consider a betrayal, fighting the knowledge that the refusal of the Sea Mages to aid the Alliance might very possibly have been the signing of the Middle Continent's death warrant.