Gerrard Cowan - The Strategist

Brandione met the courtier’s eye. Wayward had been there from the beginning. The General had been taken prisoner, accused of murdering the Strategist and three Tacticians, and sent to the Prison. He suppressed a bubble of laughter. I fought to declare my innocence. But in the end, it didn’t matter. I was always going in the same direction: to her.

He had met her in the Prison of the Doubters, in a tower in the sun. She had formed before his eyes, taking her shape from mounds of sand, coalescing into three beings: three women with one voice. He tried to picture her, in his mind, but the image was broken, incomplete, a thing of red and black and grey and white, a thing of glass crowns, a thing of mighty thrones. The Dust Queen.

She had been expecting him. The Last Doubter , she called him. A soldier and a scholar. She had enveloped him, shown him things he could not comprehend, strange things from other places, abandoned cities and broken fortresses. He saw the Strategist, in shadows and towers: the new Strategist, the one that had been prophesied. She had taken the form of a girl he recognised, a girl he had searched for long ago, in that strange museum …

The Queen always told him to ask a question, and threw him back here, to Wayward, when he asked the same one, over and over and over again.

Wayward. What is he? A guide, on this journey. The man who led him through the Queen. The one who steered him in the right direction.

‘Did you ask her the same question again?’ the courtier asked. There was an edge of impatience in his voice.

Brandione looked away for a moment. Outside, in the desert, a person had appeared. It was a man, but it was not a man. It was a creature, formed of sand, wearing a yellow cloak, holding a glass spear. He was one of the Queen’s soldiers, a member of the army Brandione had seen in the Prison of the Doubters. Her army, for him to command, she had said: his army of dust.

There was a gust of dry wind, and the soldier disappeared.

Brandione turned his attention again to Wayward. He nodded at the courtier, who frowned back.

‘What is the Machinery?’ Wayward asked. There was mockery in his words. He turned from the desk, and made his way to a golden sofa, throwing himself down and spreading out his lengthy frame. ‘She will not answer that question. Do you know why?’

‘No.’

Wayward sighed. ‘It is not a good question. It is too … precise. The Queen is old indeed. She thinks in …’ Wayward screwed his eyebrows together, and clicked his tongue in his mouth. ‘How to describe it? How to describe eternity?’ He smiled. ‘She thinks in great, sweeping, movements .’ He accompanied each word with a swing of an elegant arm. ‘Her thoughts are the circuits of the stars. Her wishes are the birth of mountains. She is the sun, hmm? She is the moon.’

Wayward cast a glance at Brandione, who did not attempt to hide his incomprehension. The courtier giggled.

‘I am … what is the word? I am pretentious. ’ He giggled. ‘I’m young, you know, very young, compared to the others. I have to make up for it by appearing knowledgeable.’ He grinned.

Brandione nodded. ‘Tell me in small words. I’m just a soldier.’

Wayward grimaced and raised a finger. ‘And a scholar. A soldier and a scholar. The Last Doubter: a man the Queen saw long ago.’ He waved his hands above his head, as if scrabbling there for the right words. ‘The Queen will only answer what she wants to answer, or what is proper for her to answer. However, she does want to answer. The more specific your question, the more precise you are, the less chance there is that she will respond. But if you are nice and general, then she will speak to you, for she can twist your question as she wishes. Hmm?’

Brandione nodded. ‘I think I understand.’

Wayward nodded. ‘Good. I am not surprised. For you are not just a soldier. You are a soldier …’

The tent began to fade away before Wayward could finish.

**

He was back in the blackness.

‘Question.’

The voice filled the void, the word echoing into the blackness. The eyes were no longer to be seen.

The one-time General searched for a question. There was something pathetic about him, this ridiculous animal, suspended in a world of higher beings, scrabbling around in his fleshy brain for something to say. In his days as a scholar – the days before soldiering, the days before the end of the world – he had read about ancient cultures. They were hives of ignorance, he had been taught, where people saw gods in the trees and the rivers. In some of the old stories, these people had met with their gods, conversed with them as equals, and even tricked them. Here he was, now, playing that same role. He was no different to the savages who walked the Plateau in the days before the Machinery.

But we were never any different, were we? The thought burst to life like a black weed. What was the Operator, if not a god? What was the Machinery?

Her eyes were before him again, no longer angry but hungry, waiting for him to speak. A god, and her mortal. But there were no tricks to be played here. Not with her.

Nice and general.

He opened his mouth, and the eyes widened.

‘What comes next?’ he asked.

The eyes widened. The darkness around them was slowly replaced with the outlines of three faces, and in a heartbeat she was before him, shining in her glory. She had taken a youthful appearance, her hair falling in golden curls, her cheeks rosy and unblemished. She wore three silver dresses, lengthy garments of a gleaming material, shining with the light of the stars and studded with tiny black stones. She grinned at him with three red mouths. She seemed more substantial than usual, though streams of dust fell away from the tips of her fingers.

She was beautiful, but she faded from his mind as soon as he turned away from her, like the memories she showed him. He closed his eyes and the image of her vanished, with only the outline remaining, only the sense of her. But when he opened them again, she was there, more terrifying and radiant and impossible than before.

‘That,’ the Dust Queen said, ‘is a good question.’

Smiles broke out across her three youthful faces, and she raised her hands. The dust at the edge of her fingers began to flow more quickly, falling away into the ether. In a moment she had disintegrated into sand. It swirled forward, encircling Brandione, and he heard her voice in his own mind.

A game.

**

He opened his eyes, and the darkness had gone.

They were on a beach, of sorts, but unlike any the former General had ever seen. The sand beneath his feet was black, and the sun in the dark sky was blood red. The water of the sea beyond crashed rhythmically against the shore, over and over, like the movements of a machine. The air here was cold, and still, and deadening.

‘Where are we?’

The Queen was by his side. She seemed smaller, somehow.

‘The Old Place,’ she said. ‘The Underland. Two of the names it has been given, over the long years.’ One of her figures knelt down, and scooped up some of the black sand in a hand. She lifted the sand up, and shared it with the other two. All of them held it in the air, and allowed it to drop from their fingers.

‘Why is the sand black?’ Brandione asked.

A moment passed, before the Dust Queen answered.

‘It is not truly sand,’ she said. ‘It is a memory. Or more than one, perhaps, fused together, and residing here in the Old Place.’

‘Sand is not black. And the sun is not red.’

The Dust Queen raised her eyebrows. ‘Have you seen all sand, my Last Doubter? Have you seen every beach since the beginning of the world?’ She pointed her three right hands at the burning orb above. ‘Have you witnessed every age of that star? Do you know what it was in its youth?’