The Hollow Queen (40 page)

The edges of the squares caught fire quickly and began to burn to the center. As they burned, the heat from the cell filled the open fabric lantern and began to cause it to expand a moment later.

And ascend slightly into the air.

Had he been a man who gave any thought whatsoever to his appearance, Achmed might have been uncomfortable at the sight of himself, attached to floating festival toys, crawling over the rock ledge at the base of the tower and making his way hurriedly to the stone obelisk. The Assassin King was incapable on a conscious, subconscious, and unconscious level of worrying about what anyone thought of him, however, so he took the pick hammer out and, with as much of a running start as he was able to make, held on to the cloak with his other hand and ran for the tower.

And, upon approaching it, leapt for it.

The lift of the lanterns surprised him; Achmed himself was capable of achieving a decent height in climbing on the initial approach, but with the assistance of the hot air and the cloth, he was tugged up one and a half times higher than he could have reached on his own.

The success caught him a bit off guard, so he dug the pick hammer into the mortar between a row of stones in the tower and clung there a moment, catching his breath.

The lanterns tugged insistently at his sides.

Achmed dug his fingers into a handhold, then pulled the pick hammer out of the mortar.

And tentatively let go.

The lanterns lifted him skyward slightly. The Bolg king kicked with his feet and achieved a good deal more altitude, wobbling only slightly under the hooded cloak. He grasped the tower wall again, affixing himself with the pick hammer.

Then, slowly, hand over hand and with the aid of the lift provided by the lanterns, he made his way up the exterior of the tower toward the open aperture he could see from below.

Hoping that no one would see him—or, more correctly, see the ridiculous floating lanterns that were lifting him up the side of one of the tallest structures in the Known World.

As he suspected, his ascent only caught the attention of nightbirds and spiders, none of whom made comment about it.

*   *   *

It was past midnight when he finally reached the tower window, Achmed guessed.

He wrapped an arm around the lower ledge of the opening, a window that was much bigger up close than it had seemed from below, and, after ascertaining that there was no one in the dark tower room or on the stairs inside it, cut the floating lanterns with the sharp edge of the pick hammer, allowing them to float up into the eaves of the tower's roof.

Then, as silently and with as little motion as he could arrange, he slid carefully over the ledge and into the tower room.

He held deathly still to make certain that he had not set off any traps. When after a moment he could perceive no changes in the floor or the air around him, he acknowledged that the ridiculous height of the tower and depth of the chasm below had undoubtedly left the planners and architects convinced that no additional security arrangements were necessary save for the mirrors he could see at the tops of each turn in the stairs, set up for the purpose of seeing attacking troops coming up them.

As he caught his breath and acclimated to the height and thinness of the air in the tower, Achmed leaned up against the wall beneath the tower window.

The leather cord around his neck pulled uncomfortably; absently, he rearranged it with his finger, then ran his hand down to the pendant that hung from it.

Rhonwyn's compass.

Or, rather, that of Merithyn the Explorer, her father, who had used it and its compatriots, Anwyn's spyglass and Manwyn's sextant, to find his way across the world to the lands of their mother, Elynsynos the dragon.

Her compass had the power to show the Seer what was occurring in the evanescent moment of the Present. Achmed gripped the instrument in his hand and concentrated, opening his brain to the question of what was occurring in the world around him at that very moment in Time.

Almost immediately, the compass began to glow in his hand.

Startled, the Bolg king took a breath and closed his eyes.

At first he saw a darkness blacker than pitch.

Then, from out of that blank panorama, a skyline appeared, the peaks of familiar mountains pressed against the sky. It was an image of the Teeth, a place he knew innately, almost as if he himself had been Gwylliam, the man who had built the impressive city-state out of unforgiving rock and started a new civilization and a new era in history there.

Achmed concentrated.

And gritted his teeth as the image formed more completely in his mind, then vanished.

Hrekin, he thought.
At this very moment, the titan is battling Grunthor
.

 

45

ON THE SKELETON COAST

Grunthor and Rath had followed the titan, night into day into night again.

They sought its trail across the empty Krevensfield Plain, whose fields still bore the ruts of the wheels of the wagons that not long ago had carried the soldiers and armaments of Sorbold to the Bolglands, only to be destroyed in a useless rout.

While Sorbold had annexed the sea and managed to amass an enormous number of slaves in their factories, their crop of military victories was beginning to grow thin. The western coast of the Middle Continent was still securely in their control, but the attempts to annex Alliance strongholds had been repelled, first by a skilled army largely comprised of women, then by a boy of seventeen summers with an elemental sword of air and an aged man who reports said fought as ferociously as an arena fighter, then by the sheer bad luck of bad intelligence that resulted in the capture of a sovereign.

Had the conflict been Weighed on the Scales of Jierna Tal, it might have been found to be balanced completely.

But none of the military matters had made their way into the ears of the Sergeant-Major or his Dhracian shadow as they traveled the continent on the occasional current of air when they could find one, or on foot when they could not.

Time was becoming suspended, Grunthor thought one late evening as they followed the scent of human flesh in fire that was inexorably wrapped around Rath's viscera.

The trail he had joked about having obtained.

Chasing this towering statue, fragile yet deadly, had become the sole focus of the Sergeant's awareness.

There's nothing left,
he thought when one day of running had turned into yet another day of running.
This is all Oi can think of—all Oi can do.

Until the day they came upon Faron on the Skeleton Coast.

 

46

WIDE CENTRAL SEA, EAST OF MANOSSE

It did not take long for the ships of the Second Fleet to develop a battle pattern.

Once they were outside of the fishing zone and the inner shipping lanes, which Talquist's armada of sporadically appearing pirate ships and armed merchant vessels had scrupulously avoided, the outer fringes of his merchant vessels began to appear.

From the bridge of the
Valiant
, Ashe watched them come, turning in to the wind.

“Come, then,” he said under his breath. “Let us hope that you enjoy the ride.”

He turned astern and shouted to his first mate.

“Stavos—prepare the braziers, the catapults, ballistae and archers!”

The orders were shouted excitedly from stem to stern. The rumble of the heavy ballistae moving into place beside the affixed catapults, the hauling and setting of the projectiles for the catapults, a heavy spear being set into each ballista ahead of its windlass being drawn back, the sheer sound of war being prepared caused a frenzy among the crew, eager to avenge their allies, friends, and families on the continent.

The wind following the ridge wave was high, so while Ashe could not hear it, he could tell by the spilling of sails and the appearance of crew scattering about the decks of nearby vessels that they were under similar orders from their captains.

As the first rank of ships in the Second Fleet came within sight of the privateers and pirates, the stronger, better-armed ships took to circling with others in the armada, trying to form a battle group, while the singletons broke and fled. So focused on the approaching ranks of battleships was the emperor's flotilla that the captains scarcely noticed the rising ridge of water that bisected the sea from north to south.

Until sight of the Second Fleet was suddenly lost, replaced by a wave that rose twelve feet, blotting out the view of the approaching ships and replacing it with a blue-gray wall moving quickly toward them, in many cases as tall as their masts.

Panic broke out, with captains on Talquist's payroll struggling to turn about in the unforgiving wind, hoisting their sails madly, doing everything they could to outrun the approaching rift in the sea.

In helpless futility.

*   *   *

“Hang back!” Ashe called as the flotilla of Talquist's ships vanished in front of the ridge of water that the Second Fleet was following.

The vast fleet spilled their sails, slowing their course, waiting for the wave to move beyond them, biding their time to see how the flotilla had fared.

The rising wall of water swept through, relentless, unremarkable in any aspect but height, and continued east, its undertow dragging the ships of the Second Fleet more rapidly with it.

As it moved away, still heading eastward past the place where the flotilla had appeared, in its wake the ships of the pirates and merchants were floating in disarray, some sundered, some capsized, all spun from their courses and struggling to get back aright.

Ashe's eyes narrowed. He turned to the crew, who seemed stunned by the terrifying maritime episode they had witnessed and that was still moving across the open sea.

“All right, let's have at it,” he commanded, signaling to the ballistae. “Spare no one. Take no one aboard, unless it happens to be a child.”

Lieutenant Stavos swallowed hard. He, like his crew, was still in shock from the sight of the wave and the devastation it had left among ships very much like the merchant vessels in their own port. And the Lord Cymrian, their sovereign and liege, whose face appeared on the coinage of the realm, had a reputation throughout the Known World as a patient, just leader, unlike his mythic grandparents, who had torn the Middle Continent apart over a simple marital spat.

The man who stood before them was giving orders against the Code of Rescue, hate of unmistakable intensity burning in his cerulean-blue eyes.

“M'lord captain, might—might we—”

The gleam in Ashe's eyes grew hotter.

“These men have broken the law of the sea,” he stated, his voice ringing in the tones of the dragon within him. “They are not Talquist's innocent dupes. They are no mere pirates and merchant privateers; they have aided in the enslavement of entire nations, in the brutalizing of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, in poisoning and starving unsuspecting friends and allies of this Alliance, and in the all-out destruction of the western coast of the continent, from Traeg to Windswere, razing the harbors of Avonderre and Tallono to ashes. Unless you see a captive in the waves, his hands tied, a woman who is with child, or an actual child, you are to scuttle each and every one of these ships and
send them to the bottom
.

“They seem helpless because, unlike the warships we will engage next, their weapons are hidden, their intent to profit off the misery of innocents. And they have, growing rich on the blood of those innocents, who, if they survived, occupy slave mines and factories building more armaments for Talquist's global conquest. No mercy, just as they have shown no mercy. Now
set to
. Those ships in the back rank of one hundred fifty, take care of this and follow us. The rest, we will proceed. Is that clear?”

Lieutenant Stavos shook off his shock. “Aye, sir.”

Ashe's head dropped as the orders were called up the ropes and aft of the deck, then signaled by flag to the ships around him.

He gripped the rail as the sails were raised again.