Greg Keyes - The Born Queen

On the music climbed, falling now and then but always tending higher, never resolving and seemingly irresolvable.

He couldn’t stop singing now if he wanted to; Mylton’s stumble had been the last time that was possible. He heard many thousands of voices now sighing in the starless gulf, then millions, and he began to panic, because he couldn’t remember how it finished, what was supposed to happen at the end. The music on paper no longer mattered. The requiem had them all in its grip now, and it was going where it wanted to. He felt his body shiver like a dragonfly’s wing and then cease to be. Nothing remained of him but his voice.

The end came, and it was terrifying, wonderful, and then—in a single, impossible moment—perfect. Every note fit with every other. Every voice supported every other. Everything was in its place. The voices of the dead faded with his own.

Mery sagged against the wall and collapsed.

Out in the yard, the head of Robert Dare stopped trying to talk.

Hespero came at him like lightning, lunging and thrusting at Cazio’s groin. He parried quickly in uhtave, but the blade wasn’t there, for the fratrex had disengaged. It was only by wild chance that he managed to catch the blade a second time and stop it from running through his throat.

Cazio stepped back.

“You know how to use a sword pretty well.”

“I may have neglected to mention that I studied with Mestro Espedio.”

Cazio narrowed his eyes. “I met another student of his not long ago. Acredo. This is his sword.” “An acquaintance,” Hespero said. “You killed him, I gather.”

“No. An arrow did.”

Hespero shrugged and came at him again, using the attack of the Cuckold’s Walk Home. Cazio countered it, move for move for move. Acredo nearly had killed him with that attack when they had fought because Cazio hadn’t known the final reply, but he knew the point would be at his throat when it was all over, so he finished with a high controsesso.

Again he didn’t find the blade, but Hespero’s found him, slipping through the ribs of his right side. Cazio fell back, looking at the blood in utter disbelief. Hespero came grimly on.

You’re going to be fine, Cazio thought. He got lucky.

He parried the next attack barely and then desperately struck deep. His blade grazed Hespero’s off-weapon hand and drew blood.

That was a nice surprise.

“You’re a better swordsman than I thought,” Cazio said. “But you aren’t invulnerable anymore.” “If you treat that wound now, you might live,” Hespero said.

“Oh, you’re not getting away that easily,” Cazio said.

“I don’t have time for this,” the fratrex said.

Cazio renewed his attack, a feint to the hand, a bind from perto to uhtave.

Hespero punched him in the jaw with his off-weapon hand. Cazio reeled back, trying desperately to get his guard up.

Austra launched herself at the fratrex, leaping on his back and wrapping her arms around his neck. Hespero reached back with his left hand and grabbed her by the hair, but she didn’t let go until he slammed her into the wall.

By that time Cazio was on his feet, albeit unsteadily. He lurched toward Hespero.

“Saints, you really don’t know when to quit,” Hespero said.

Cazio didn’t waste his limited breath answering; he stamped and started an attack in perto. Hespero, a little impatiently, bound in sesso and riposted; Cazio ducked and lunged low but short.

Hespero started the Cuckold’s Walk Home, and Cazio kept up with him, barely. The last feint came to his throat, and he desperately parried again, and again the blade wasn’t there.

Neither was Cazio. As the final flank stroke came, he twisted his body out of the way and counterattacked rather than trying to parry. Acredo slid neatly through the churchman’s solar plexus. “Don’t ever try the same thing on me twice,” Cazio advised, yanking the blade out.

Hespero went down on one knee, then suddenly leaped forward. Cazio caught the blade and turned it in a bind, so close to missing it that the point dragged across his forehead. Hespero’s low lunge exposed his back, and Cazio drove his sword down between his shoulder blades.

Then he slipped on his own blood and fell. As Austra rushed to him, he put his hand over his wound and closed his eyes.

Stephen cupped Anne’s face in his hand and smiled ever more broadly.

“Are you ready, little queen?”

Anne felt as if her head were full of wasps, but she couldn’t do anything but stare up at him with hatred. But then she felt new strength enter her, strength of a sort she had never known before. It came boiling up in her not from the sedos but from the awful depths surrounding all, the chaos from which the world had been born.

My gift, o Queen, Qexqaneh said.

Her lungs cleared. The weight vanished.

The law of death is mended, the Skaslos said.

Stephen staggered back. “No,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” Anne said. “Certainly yes.”

Her right hand was the sickle of the dark moon, and her left was the hammer of old night, and with them she struck so that he fell in pieces and she hurled the pieces out into the abyss, and she stood and grew until the world was tiny beneath her.

Now, the Kept murmured. Now, my sweet, you only need kill me, and all is done.

Anne stretched her grin. “And how do I do that, Qexqaneh?”

You are the rivers. You are the Night Before the World. Take me into you and destroy me. Give me oblivion at long last. You have my power. Now take my soul.

“Fine,” Anne said. “I’ll do that, then.”

Cazio felt Austra stumble. He tried to put all his weight back on his own feet, but they just wouldn’t take it.

“Stop that,” Austra said. “I can support you.”

“Not up the hill, you can’t,” Cazio said.

“I have to get you to a leic,” she replied.

“I think it would be better if you went and found one,” he said.

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“Then just sit here with me,” he said.

“That’s stupid. You’re bleeding.”

“It’s not so bad,” he lied.

“I’m not a fool, Cazio,” she muttered. “Why does everyone take me for a fool?”

As they crossed the threshold of the crypt, Austra went rigid and gasped. Cazio looked to see what the matter was. Stephen Darige lay facedown a few feet away, but that didn’t seem to be what she was looking at.

“Oh, no,” Austra said. She suddenly felt very warm—no, hot, so hot he couldn’t keep his arm across her shoulders. He stood away, teetered, and had to lean against the mausoleum wall to stay on his feet. “No,” Austra repeated. Her eyes suddenly incandesced, and yellow flame sprang from them.

“Austra!” he screamed.

She looked at him, and she wasn’t Austra but a woman with fine, dark features and arching brows, then a Sefry with white hair. She was Anne, with flaming tresses. She was every woman Cazio had ever made love to, then every woman he had ever met. Her clothes had begun to smolder.

“What’s happening?” Cazio screamed.

“She’s doing it!” Austra said, her voice changing like her face. Then, more exultantly, “We’re doing it!” The ground suddenly was colored with strange light, and Cazio looked up and saw a sun descending toward them, a ball of writhing flame and shadow that made the oldest, most animal parts of him quiver and long to run and never stop running, to find a place where a thing like that couldn’t be.

Instead he held on to the stone, panting, fighting the fear with all the life he had left in him. “Austra,” someone said quietly.

Stephen was standing a few kingsyards away. He didn’t look good. For one thing, one of his eyes was missing.