Энтони Райан - Queen of Fire

Her face took on a bland neutrality and she bowed. “The queen waits upon your attendance, my lord.”

She was in the palace grounds surveying the part-completed marble relief carved by Master Benril. A short way off the Lady Davoka stood alongside another Lonak woman, younger and considerably less tall. The younger woman straightened at sight of Vaelin, her face curious, as if voicing an unspoken question.

“My lord,” Lyrna greeted him brightly. “How went the conclave?”

He was unsurprised by her knowledge. She had all of her fatherʼs gift for accruing intelligence and more subtle ways of exploiting it. “The Faith seeks to rebuild itself,” he said. “And will, of course, support your endeavour with all their remaining strength.”

“And Lady Reva?”

“Also unrelenting in pursuit of your purpose, Highness.”

She nodded, her gaze still fixed on the marble relief. Although it was unfinished Vaelin found the carvings remarkably lifelike, the expressions and poses of the figures possessed of a precision and verisimilitude surpassing even Benrilʼs other work. The faces of the Volarian soldiery and Realm folk alike were riven with all the fear, rage and confusion of people truly faced with the horrors of war.

“Remarkable isnʼt it?” Lyrna observed. “And yet Master Benril has formally petitioned me to have it destroyed.”

“No doubt it serves as a painful reminder of his enslavement.”

“But in years to come, perhaps we will all require something to remind us of what provoked our course. I think Iʼm minded to leave it as it is. If the masterʼs temper cools in time, he may be persuaded to finish it, to his own design of course.”

Lyrna raised a hand to call Davoka and the other Lonak woman forward. “This is Kiral of the Black River Clan. She has a message for you.”

“You speak my tongue very well.” He had taken her to his fatherʼs house where he and his sister made a home of sorts amongst the less damaged rooms. Alornis was absent, gone to the docks on some errand, probably keen to paint the panorama of ships crowding the harbour. They sat together under the sheltering oak in the yard, its mighty branches bare of leaves as winterʼs chill grew deeper by the day.

“ She knew your tongue,” Kiral said. “So I know it.”

He had heard the story from Lyrna and could scarcely credit it: a soul possessed by one of the Allyʼs creatures and now freed. And a singer with a message. Yet somehow he knew the truth of it, just by looking into her face he knew she heard a song and found himself shamed by the jealousy it stirred.

“She remembered you,” the Lonak girl went on. “You barred her from a kill. Her hatred was great.”

He remembered Sister Hennaʼs enraged, hissing face as he held her to the wall. “You possess her memories?”

“Some. She was very old, though not so old as her brother and sister, nor so deadly. She feared them and hated them in equal measure. I have the healing arts she learned in the Fifth Order, the rites performed by a priestess somewhere in the far south of the Alpiran Empire, the knife skills of a Volarian slave girl sent to die in their spectacles.”

“Do you know when she was first taken?”

“Her early memories are a mist of confusion and fear, chief among them the sight of mud huts burning under a broad night sky.” Kiral paused to give an involuntary shudder. “The vision fades and she hears his voice.”

“What does he say?”

She shook her head. “She always shrank from the memory, preferring to dwell on her many lifetimesʼ worth of murder and deceit.”

“Iʼm sorry for you. It must… hurt.”

Kiral shrugged her slender shoulders. “When I dream, mostly.” She looked up at the branches of the great oak above her head, a small smile coming to her lips. “There,” she said, pointing to a wide fork near the main trunk. “You would sit there, watching your father groom his horses.” Her smile faded. “He was afraid of you, though you never knew it.”

He stared up at the oak for a time. His memories of playing in its arms had always been happy, but now he wondered if his childʼs eyes had seen more than he recalled. “Your song is strong,” he told her.

“Yours was stronger. I can hear its echo. To lose such strength must be hard.”

“As a younger man I feared it, but in time I knew it as a gift. And yes, I miss it greatly.”

“So now I will be your song, as the Mahlessa commands.”

“And what does she command?”

“I hear a voice calling to me from a great distance, far to the east. Itʼs a very old tune, and very lonely, sung by a man who cannot die, a man you have met.”

“His name?”

“I know not, but the music carries an image of a boy who once offered him shelter from a storm, and risked his life to save him and his charge.”

Erlin. It all tumbled into place in a rush, the rage Erlin had been shouting into the storm that night, his world-spanning travels, and his unchanged face when he came to share the truth about Davernʼs father. Erlin, Rellis, Hetril, heʼs got a hundred names, Makril had said, though Vaelin now knew he had begun with only one. That day at the fair as he stared at the puppet show… “Kerlis,” he said in a whisper. “Kerlis the Faithless. Cursed to the ever death for denying the Departed.”

“A legend,” Kiral said. “My people have another story. They tell of a man who offended Mirshak, God of the Black Lands, and was cursed to craft a story without ending.”

“You know where to find him?”

She nodded. “And I know he is important. The song is bright with purpose when it touches him, and the Mahlessa believes he is key to defeating whatever commands the thing that stole my body.”

“Where?”

Her scar twisted as she gave an apologetic grimace. “Across the ice.”

She pauses to survey the Council before taking her seat, twenty men in fine red robes seated around a perfectly circular table. The council chamber sits halfway up the tower, each member having been hauled to this height by the strength of a hundred slaves working the intricate pulleys that trace the length of this monolith. Blessed by endless life though they are, no Council-man relishes the prospect of climbing so many stairs.

She sits through the tedium of the opening formalities as Arklev intones the formal commencement of the fourth and final council meeting of this, the eight hundred and twenty-fifth year of the empire, the slave scribes scribbling away with their unnatural speed as he drones on, introducing each member in turn, until finally he comes to her.

“… and newly ascended to the Slaverʼs Seat, Council, ah, Woman…”

“I am to be recorded as simply the Allyʼs Voice,” she tells him, casting a meaningful glance at the scribes.

Arklev falters for a moment but recovers with admirable fortitude. “As you wish. Now, to our first order of business…”

“The only order of business,” she interrupts. “The war. This council has no other business until it is concluded.”

Another Council-man stirs, a silver-haired dullard whose name she canʼt trouble herself to recall. “But, there are pressing matters from the south, reports of famine…”

“There was a drought,” she says. “Crops fail and people starve. Have any surplus slaves killed to husband supplies until it abates. All very sad but survivable, our current military situation may not be.”