The Hidden Queen (24 page)

T
he air was still as Anghara stepped out of the colonnade. Still enough that every breath she drew was loud in the silence. There had been something oddly different about the columns as she’d walked past them on her way back toward ai’Jihaar and the camp, tugging insistently at the fringes of Anghara’s thoughts, sliding just past the edge of focus. But it was the stillness which held her mind. The wind had been the only living thing about this place when she had first seen this valley. Now it was gone. Her mind was slowed, drifting, sinking into this hush; there was something very important she was missing, and she could not grasp it. She felt the first slow beat of panic rouse within her.

Anghara paused for a moment at the edge of the colonnade, briefly leaning on the last pillar for support as she stepped away. The column was cool and rough underneath her palm; she felt a flake of stone crumble at her touch, fall into silky dust over the skin of her hand. As she came closer, ai’Jihaar reached out for her hands and Anghara placed her own into them, obediently, almost mechanically. The
sen’thar
squeezed them; whatever exhilaration Anghara was failing to feel, ai’Jihaar felt for both of them.

“For this,” she said, “for this alone I can raise you to the gold, Anghara, and there would be not a single voice against it.”

A flake

“I did nothing,” she murmured.

of stone

“But you did,” said ai’Jihaar.

crumble

“What is it, Anghara?” ai’Jihaar’s voice sank into apprehension, sudden concern.

at her touch.

The panic exploded, passion, sorrow, fear; Anghara snatched her hands out of ai’Jihaar’s and covered her face, unable to restrain a cry of pain. Familiar pain.

“I destroyed it,” she moaned, feeling hot tears spring to her eyes. “I destroyed it.”

“Anghara! That is not true!” said ai’Jihaar, reaching out to grasp her shoulders.

Anghara flung out an arm with a tight, savage motion and pointed to the colonnade with a hand which shook. “No? Look at it!” And then, with a brittle little laugh, remembering whom she was addressing, “Feel it, then. When I walked in, this place was ageless, eternal; I touched stone which had been smooth for a thousand years. Touch it now!”

Stepping up to the colonnade, ai’Jihaar laid both hands, palms flat, on the stone.

“Ah.”

The single word brimmed with understanding and ai’Jihaar stood motionless for a long moment; behind her, Anghara slowly sank to her knees. Her eyes were dark with tears, with guilt, with memory; once again the ghosts of Bresse danced in the moonlight, ghosts of another place of power which had invited Anghara of Roisinan inside and then crumbled in her wake.

“Anghara.” There was no response; ai’Jihaar reached deeper.
Anghara. Gul Qara was dead, long before you came. If there was a shadow of life, then it lingered here waiting for you. For you. You could not destroy this; all you did was come for that which was yours, and then you freed the spirit of this place to its rest.

Every place that was ever a help or comfort to me…I have paid back with death…

Here you did not kill. You resurrected. I heard Gul Qara speak to you, Anghara, as it has spoken to no other in living memory, and beyond. Death has lived in this valley for longer than you can imagine, and it fell to you to reach through it and touch a power of the Elder Days. There is pride in this; not sorrow, not anguish.

But Anghara was gazing once again at the pillars of the oracle, and in her eyes was fiery pain. “If I had known that this was what I was coming here to do,” she whispered, out loud, closing her mind to ai’Jihaar at last, “I would never have come.”

For now, in the moonlight, she could see the ravaged pillars with pitiless clarity. The weight of all the years that had passed it by settled upon Gul Qara in a single moment of time. The gray stone was scored and pitted as though from centuries of sandstorms, cracked from empty decades of merciless sun. Dust seeped from deep seams. The intricate carving around the pillars’ massive bases had vanished, worn into shapeless nubs within seconds. Anghara, who remembered the timeless beauty which had existed here barely minutes before, felt as though she had been stabbed to the heart.

The smell of the sea was only a lingering memory; the word…the word she had almost heard…She searched desperately in the recesses of her mind, her memories, but that was gone too, if it had ever really existed. Anghara felt fresh tears well up behind the ones that had dried on her cheeks.

“And it was all for nothing,” she murmured.

“You cannot know that. Something that came to you this way, across the yawning gap of so many years, must have meaning. Somewhere. What happened in there, Anghara?”

“You said you heard,” said Anghara, dropping her eyes onto the pale sand at her feet.

“Only the wind, at the last,” said ai’Jihaar.

“It could have been anything,” said Anghara. “How could you know that it was…”

“I knew,” said ai’Jihaar, very softly, “because you were a creature of light and power standing in a place out of time. I knew you had touched the oracle long before I heard the wind call your name.”

Anghara’s head whipped round so fast that she had to reach up and push a swatch of hair out of her eyes before she could see again. “Is that what you heard?”

“I heard the wind blow a clarion call,” said ai’Jihaar. “It was a sound not of nature, never before heard in this place, unless in encounters which took place so long ago they are legend by now. What words Gul Qara had for you, I do not know.”

“Nothing,” said Anghara with barely leashed violence. “A half-formed whisper, gone before I could grasp it. And then nothing. Unless…”

“Unless…” prompted ai’Jihaar after a moment of lengthening silence.

“There was…”began Anghara, not quite sure how to begin describing this, and then settling for blunt truth, “I smelled the sea.”

“The
sea?
” repeated ai’Jihaar blankly, caught completely off guard.

Anghara, who had been watching her with almost pitiful hope, looked away again. “You don’t know. You see, it means nothing.”

“I do not know everything,” ai’Jihaar said gently. “But meaning will come to you, in time.”

Anghara made a sound halfway between a laugh and a choking sob. “Yes. And perhaps it won’t,” she said, when she had her voice back under control. There was a flatness in it which, for the first time, gave ai’Jihaar a twinge of fear. They had Khar’i’id to face again—sooner than she had expected, for there was no reason to linger in this place any longer—and Khar’i’id showed no mercy to the wounded. The strength that had taken Anghara to Gul Qara was spent—it died this night; and without that strength, the grim passage through what remained of the Stone Desert would be a gamble, with Anghara’s very life at stake.

And ai’Jihaar knew well what lay at the root of this new burden—Bresse, always Bresse, the place Anghara would always think she had abandoned to a revenge which should have claimed only herself. Morgan may have chosen a martyr’s death with a very good idea of what she was doing, but she was a persistent ghost. She could not have imagined the side-effects her deed would have—her act of selfimmolation to ensure her chick freedom to fly may have crippled the young bird’s wings forever. Sif may have been the one to give the order to destroy Castle Bresse, but Anghara had taken the guilt of its ruin on her own shoulders.

“Bresse chose what it chose, Anghara,” she said, knowing that she wounded but willing to try even pain to shock Anghara back into a semblance of normality. There was a fey quality to her that night, something that would hand Khar’i’id the key for her destruction unless ai’Jihaar could break it quickly, here. “That is not on your conscience, no more than this. The only thing you did at Gul Qara was set free a spirit which may well have longed for release these many centuries—after calling it back, one last time, to offer you what gifts it could in return. I promise you, Anghara, for this night there is no one who could deny you the gold robe of the
an’sen’thar.
”

“No,” said Anghara. “Not for death.”

“Not death,” ai’Jihaar said, quietly insistent, stretching out her hand. “Come. You need rest.”

“No,” said Anghara again, more softly. “Leave me be. I need to watch. I need to remember this.”

For a moment, ai’Jihaar hesitated and then, unexpectedly, offered a silent gesture of acceptance and respect with the graceful desert salutation Anghara had seen for the first time at the entrance to the Desert Gate. Its meaning was suddenly augmented by many other nuances: heart—the love and pride of a teacher for her pupil, a mother for her child; lips—a giving into silence of all the words that became unnecessary, already woven into that love and pride; brow—the salute of an equal to an equal, to someone who, although still learning, could rise to be greater than her teacher.

If ai’Jihaar thought she had succeeded in taking some small part of Anghara’s pain away, it had not been enough. The wind had abandoned Gul Qara, and the valley was hot and airless as they arose the next morning, but Anghara’s hand was cold in ai’Jihaar’s as the
sen’thar
reached to cover it where it rested on the ki’thar’s bridle. Now dusty and scorched by the harsh desert sun to a faded pink, the bridle was but a distant memory of the brave, royal red of the Sa’alah courtyard.

Anghara felt her concern.

“I am all right,” she said, but her voice was oddly lifeless. She had slept at last, by the colonnade of Gul Qara, and when she had woken it was to see two of the great pillars leaning drunkenly against their neighbors. It was a matter of time. Anghara had thought the pain had been deep enough the previous night, but the sight of this new ruin, still perfect in a grotesquely sterile, beautiful way, had showed her there was yet life’s-blood to be had from her. It would take days, perhaps only hours, for the place which had stood everything time could throw against it to crumble in the wake of Anghara Kir Hama’s passing.

“We could spare the day, if you need it,” said ai’Jihaar quietly.

“Here?” asked Anghara.

Silently ai’Jihaar’s hand dropped away. Anghara was right, of course; anywhere, anywhere but Gul Qara, was where she wanted to be. She did not want to see the moment when the first column fell.

“Anghara. Be careful; be vigilant. Khar’i’id cannot understand mistakes, and will not forgive them.”

“I do not forget,” said Anghara.

It was not enough. But it was all Anghara was giving, and after another moment ai’Jihaar sighed and turned away. “Go,” she said. “I follow.”

And so Anghara led them out of the valley and back into the black hills, through the twisting passages with their pockets of still, empty air, and finally back onto the black, stony wasteland of Khar’i’id.

What had come to pass in Gul Qara was nothing to the Stone Desert—praise or punishment, it had not been in its own power to offer. It had been content to relinquish the travellers into the hidden valley in the heart of the Empty Quarter—and waited with implacable, inhuman patience until they emerged. Now, even as Anghara stepped back into the shimmering heat of the barren plain, Khar’i’id gathered its forces for the moment of destiny, readying the double-edged gift which was to be the desert’s own price for her passage—and her reward.

When the appointed hour finally came, it burst upon them without warning.

Despite ai’Jihaar’s repeated urging, neither was vigilant that morning. Anghara found herself lost in dark thoughts of her own, waking up into the reality of Khar’i’id every now and again with a sense of what was almost surprise. Walking behind her young charge, ai’Jihaar could sense her doing this—and knew how deadly it could be, in this of all places. It was during one of these periods—when the desert, which ought to have been the only focus of every waking thought had become no more than a backdrop against which they moved—that Khar’i’id struck.

With Anghara turned inward and ai’Jihaar focused on Anghara, the two diamondskins sunning themselves directly in their path went completely unnoticed until Anghara’s ki’thar snorted suddenly and bucked sideways with a sudden furious strength. Taken wholly by surprise, Anghara felt the rein jerk from her fingers as she stumbled onto her knees. Equally startled, ai’Jihaar cried out and dropped her own ki’thar’s lead rein—only for the animal to pick up its mate’s alarm, and plunge forward directly into her path, forcing her to step back to avoid being trampled.

The two diamondskins in the front, the cause of all the consternation, had long since fled, slipping into the shadows of the black rocks.

The one behind ai’Jihaar, which none had yet observed, was still there. Her heel came down on its tail; the lizard twisted with uncanny speed and sank its poisoned fangs through the soft, thin leather of her riding boot and into her ankle.

With the lizards which had sparked off their own alarm now out of the way, the ki’thar’en had regained their equanimity and come to a placid stop only a few steps away, trailing their reins. Anghara scrambled up from the scorching ground, her hands tingling with the heat as though she had just passed them through a fire, and ran back to where ai’Jihaar had collapsed almost without a sound, her breathing sharp and shallow, her blind eyes closed.

“No!” Anghara sobbed, coming to rest on her knees beside the
sen’thar.
“Gods, no!”

At her voice, ai’Jihaar’s eyelids flickered open. “Take all the waterskins…and head north…” she said, her voice rasping in her throat, concerned even in these, her last moments, about the welfare of one who was not born of the desert and for whom the loss of her guide and teacher may well mean death. “Find…a hai’r…a caravan…show them my
say’yin
…Someone…will take you to Al’haria…to the
sen’en’thari
…tell them I sent you…they can…take you home…”

Anghara had seen the telltale puncture marks; undoing ai’Jihaar’s burnoose with hands that trembled, she had seen the pallor of her skin, the white rim around the
sen’thar’s
thin-lipped mouth. She could feel the white flame flickering erratically, fitfully, dying away.