Queen of Fire
The figure moved through the carnage without seeming to notice it, stepping over corpses and striding through pooled blood in a steady, untroubled stride. The red-armoured men moved aside at his approach, not in respect, for they made no bows or other show of obeisance, but as if in answer to an unspoken command. Once he had passed they would return to their ghastly amusements without a glance in his direction. His face became clear as he neared the platform steps, pausing to gaze upwards, brow so deeply lined now it appeared scarred, the glow of a thousand fires flickering on the grey of his beard.
He grimaced as he began to climb, his legs stiff and back stooped from the effort. On reaching the platform he paused, issuing a loud, weary groan, then glanced back at the chaos below. The expression on his aged face was one Vaelin knew all too well. The one who commands them, he thought, seeing the hungry malice that twisted the bearded man’s features.
“He did this,” Vaelin realised aloud. “He destroyed his own city.”
“And a great deal more besides,” Erlin said as the bearded man moved to the centre of the platform, halting before the black stone plinth, looking down into the void of its surface. He stood there for some time, until the screams and the last thunderous rumble of destruction faded, leaving only the continuing roar of the flames.
The bearded man raised his visage to the night sky, eyes closed as he extended a hand to the stone. His malice seemed to have vanished now, leaving a depth of weariness Vaelin found almost pitiable. Where before his hand had trembled, now it shook as if afflicted with palsy, the bearded man’s mouth opening in a silent scream …
Abruptly he whirled away from the stone with a shout, chest heaving and features livid with rage and another expression Vaelin knew well; the twitching, bright-eyed mask of a prideful man unwilling to acknowledge his own defeat.
A large troop of red-armoured men ascended the steps at a run, bearing several long wooden beams. The bearded man moved away from the black stone as his servants moved in. They placed the beams under the plinth’s wide, mushroom-like top and lifted it up, bearing it away quickly, seemingly uncaring of the weight as they proceeded down the steps and through the corpse-choked streets below.
The bearded man lingered for a moment, eyes narrow as they scanned the platform. There was also a slight smile to his lips, a faint glimmer of humour in his eyes. He knows I see this, Vaelin decided, the freezing chill of realisation coursing through him as he saw the malice return to the bearded man’s face, his smile lingering as he turned and descended the steps without a backward glance. No more than a great stone head waiting for the ages to turn him to dust … The Ally.
“Did you know?”
“I had suspicions.” Erlin raised a hand to the memory stone. “But these memories are so ancient. So many lives have been lived since, a thousand kingdoms risen and fallen, spawning countless mysteries.”
“Lionen said you would touch the black stone,” Vaelin pressed. “But not be you when you did. What did he mean?”
“I think he meant we have much to think on.” Erlin extended his other hand to Vaelin. “Nothing else will occur here, though I once waited the best part of a month to confirm it. Wait long enough and perhaps you’ll see the Lonak arrive.”
Vaelin sighed, casting a final look at the still-smouldering ruins before moving to take Erlin’s hand, then drawing back in alarm as it turned to dust before he could grasp it. The vortex returned in a heartbeat, taking Erlin with it. There seemed to be a new ferocity to the swirling dust now, the colours changing, a more complex dance to the spiral of chaos. It faded as quickly as it had come, revealing the mountain top above the Lathera village. Except now he was alone and it was night, the clouds above turned into a roiling orange roof by the glow from the fire mountains. Their fury seemed brighter now, his eyes picking out a gout of molten rock amidst the flame and smoke, a small tremor pulsing through the rock beneath his feet.
“So,” a voice said. “Do you have happier tidings for me?”
Lionen walked towards him from the cluster of dwellings. He was older, his long hair mostly grey, his face still lean but also lined. He paused a few feet away, frowning as he took in Vaelin’s appearance. “Ah. It has only been moments for you, has it not?”
Vaelin nodded. “My friend…”
“This memory is not for him.” Lionen turned, extending a hand towards the dwellings. “I was about to have supper. Would you care to join me?”
“Your knowledge of my language has improved,” Vaelin observed, following Lionen to one of the larger dwellings. He noted the others were all silent, the windows absent any light.
“I have had many years to study it. And several others, though I find it my favourite. Less flowing than Seordah but more poetic and functional than Volarian.” Lionen stood aside at the door to his house, gesturing for Vaelin to precede him. Inside the air was warm, the chamber sparsely furnished with a low wooden bunk and some scrolls stacked in the corner. A small iron pot steamed over a fire, the smoke escaping into a narrow channel in the roof.
“I would offer you some stew,” Lionen said, taking a seat beside the fire. “But it would be a redundant gesture.”
“I can feel,” Vaelin said. “But not touch. Why?”
“The stone captures place and the time, but they are unchanging. As is our conversation. It has already happened, even though for both of us it appears to be happening now. What has happened cannot be changed, and so you cannot touch it. Change is the province of the future.”
He lifted the lid on the stewpot, tasting a sample with a small spoon. “Quail with wild thyme and mushrooms,” he said. “Pity you can’t have any. I’ve had a great deal of time to perfect the recipe.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Fifteen years since I built this miniature city. I had companions then.”
“What happened to them?”
“Some left, bored with my inactivity. Others disappointed by my lessons and seeking wisdom elsewhere. The remainder I sent away. I find youth tedious these days, they’re always so terribly earnest.”
“The stone outside, you carved it, filled it with your memories.”
“And more besides. The stones were not simply repositories for memory. They were also a means of communication, each one connected to the other. A useful innovation for a civilisation that spanned half the world.”
“All brought down by your sister’s husband?”
“Yes. Whilst I roamed the ice searching for the impossible, he had other work in mind.”
Vaelin recalled the cave paintings, the three visitors who became two. “Your sister died saving the ice people. You brought sickness and she healed them, though it cost her life.”
“She was a healer. She saw it as an obligation, though we begged her to stop.”
“Is that what changed him? Made him hate what he built?”
“Essara’s death may have darkened his soul, but I suspect his first steps along the path to what he is now were taken long before. It was the disappointment, you see, the constant dissatisfaction. He tried so hard to build his perfect world, a civilisation that would see humanity ascend to something greater. But people are still people, however comfortable their surroundings. They lie, they feud, they betray and however much you give them, they always want more. Without my sister’s influence it grew harder and harder for him to keep giving, keep guiding in the hope they would one day fulfil his great vision. And so, having proved themselves unworthy of the world he had crafted for them, he resolved to bring it all down.”
Lionen took a bowl and began filling it with stew, from the aroma Vaelin judged his liking for the recipe to be well-founded. “Tell me,” he said, settling back, bowl in hand, “did the Eorhil woman find the stone I left for her?”
Vaelin recalled Wisdom’s tale of her journey to the fallen city, the meeting with the shade of Nersus Sil Nin. “She did, with help from a blind woman who shared your gift.”
“Ah, the blind woman.” Lionen s
miled fondly as he ate. “Often seen in my visions, but never spoken to. Such a comely thing in her youth, I should greatly have liked to meet her.”
“You crafted the stone that gave Wisdom her name,” Vaelin said. “Knowing she would find it one day.”
“The vision changes, sometimes she finds it, sometimes she doesn’t. I suspect the blind woman saw the need to give destiny a small nudge. I journeyed back to the city after my time on the ice, finding long-rotted corpses and destruction, a scene my gift had never revealed to me for it has always cast my sight far into the future. The black stone had gone and the memory stone lay shattered, though I was able to pull enough knowledge from the fragments to divine who had done this thing. I spent years amidst the ruins, lost in grief, diverting myself with learning the language and lore revealed by my gift. One day it brought a vision of the Eorhil woman holding a perfectly square stone fashioned from the same material as the memory stone, except such an artifact did not exist in this fallen city, so I made it. I recrafted the memory stone, chiselling away for the better part of a year until it was just a small cube, and into it I poured all the knowledge revealed by my gift. I hope it made her happy.”
“It made her … of great use to her people, and mine. For which I thank you.”
Lionen gave an affable shrug and returned to his meal. “What were you looking for?” Vaelin asked him as the silence grew long. “Out on the ice where you took your sister’s body.”
“A legend. I know to you my people are little more than myth, but in this time we have our own tales, old songs from the days when the earth was young. I’ve seen much that would suggest this world is far more ancient than we could ever comprehend, a mother to countless wonders. I went in search of one, a being the people of your time would term a god, said to have the power to return the dead.”
His gaze grew distant and he resumed his meal, eating in silence. Vaelin wondered if this meeting was so familiar to Lionen he had become wearied with the repetition. It occurred to him that his gift was truly a curse, filling his mind with visions of a future so distant and removed from this time but holding a terrible truth, robbing his own age of meaning.
Another tremor shook the ground, stronger this time, causing the shutters on the windows to rattle and shaking Lionen from his silence. He scraped the last of his stew from the bowl and rose, taking it outside. Vaelin followed, finding him tying it to a length of rope strung between two dwellings. “It’s a long climb down to the river,” he said. “The wind will scour it clean. An empty gesture, but I’ve always found habits hard to break.”
“Did you find it?” Vaelin prompted. “This god of legend?”
Lionen’s gaze shifted to something beyond Vaelin’s shoulder. “I think you know what I found, oh Shadow of Ravens.”
He knew what he would see, even though it had made no growl this time, and its approach had been silent. It was not so large as before, its shoulders level with Vaelin’s waist, though he had long suspected it could assume whatever size it chose.
The wolf trotted closer, nose close the ground as it sniffed the stone around Vaelin’s feet, reminding him of how Scratch would search for a scent. “He can smell you, though you are but an echo cast back from times to come,” Lionen said. “It would seem he wants to be able to find you again.”
The wolf sat back on its haunches, long pink tongue sliding over its lips as it yawned, green eyes regarding Vaelin with placid affection. “He followed you from the ice?” he asked Lionen.
“Yes. I found him so far north I suspect I stood atop the entire world. He was bigger then, every inch the god I expected to find. He came close, sniffed at Essara’s body, used his teeth to pull away the shroud covering her face. For one mad second I thought he was going to eat her, but instead he licked her face, just once … And I heard her voice.”
Lionen’s face clouded and he started back to the memory stone, Vaelin following with the wolf padding alongside. “You have more questions for me,” Lionen said. “Please make them quick. Time grows short.”
“The black stone,” Vaelin said. “What is it? Why did he take it?”
“I told you, it’s a box. One we opened together, and this world is the result.”
“You said Erlin would touch it, but not be him when he did. What did you mean?”
“The ancient man told you he was nearly taken before, when he came close to death and touched the Beyond. You know the Ally uses others to wreak his havoc in the world, souls captured and twisted to his purpose. Why do you suppose he didn’t send one of them to steal Erlin’s body?”
Lionen halted before the stone, smiling faintly. “The last one ever to be carved, by my own hand. The stone itself comes from but one mine, deep in the mountains found in the place you call the Northern Reaches. We also found the black stone there, just one huge nugget of it with very singular properties. It was his idea to carve it, of course, though my sister argued against it. ‘Such power should not be placed in human hands,’ she said. He laughed and held her close, saying, ‘All power should be in human hands, my love. For how else can we transcend humanity?’”
“Power,” Vaelin said. “He is drawn to it.”
“As a vulture to a corpse. And what greater power is there than the ability to defeat death itself?” There was a weight to Lionen’s words now, a grave intent in his eyes, the meaning all too clear.
“I will not do that,” Vaelin stated.
“Then watch your world die as I watched mine. The land that surrounds us is barren, and so it is for mile after mile in all directions. Small villages survive here and there, a few towns that somehow weathered the storm, the attentions of what they called the Dermos. In time they’ll grow, build kingdoms and then an empire, forgetting their legends and making themselves ripe for his purpose with their endless greed. For now, he waits. I can feel him, coiling in the Beyond, plotting, planning. Not yet strong enough to capture me when I pass, though I’ve little doubt he’ll try.”
“You killed him,” Vaelin said. “You’re the reason he is in the Beyond.”
“How else would I have gathered followers in such a barren land? With the wolf’s help I sought out those that could help me, a band of brave warriors and those possessed of gifts they barely understood, all grieving over family or lovers lost to his onslaught. The Volarians will call them the Guardians in time. Together we killed him.”
Lionen gestured to the stone, casting an urgent look to the east as the ground shook again. “It’s time.”
“Something is about to happen,” Vaelin said.
“A long-promised ending.” Lionen turned to face the fire mountains, Vaelin seeing their fiery glow grown even brighter, the blanket of cloud above now a deeper shade of red. “An eruption fifty miles from here is about to cast forth a cloud of hot ash that will descend upon this mountain faster than any man could hope to run. It will settle, concealing this place from human eyes for centuries, though eventually the elements will strip it away, and my bones with it. The only vision of my own time I was ever permitted, my own death.”
“You have seen my future?” Vaelin asked. “You have seen what happens to my people?”
Lionen glanced over his shoulder and smiled. It was a smile of genuine regret, rich in sympathy and absent any irony. “I have seen enough to pity you, Shadow of Ravens.” He turned back to the fire mountains as the ground shook once more, the force of it making him stagger.
“You need to kill his creatures,” he said. “Trap them in their stolen bodies and kill them. Without tools in this world his need to act will be even greater, the lure of power impossible to resist. The black stone resides in the arena in Volar. When it’s done, take him there. One touch and it gives. A second and it takes.”
A booming roar came from the east, accompanied by a huge gout of lava, ascending in a fountain of fire before streaming down the flanks of the mountain that had birthed it. The mountain top shook, sending Lionen to his knees, the sky above turning black as the fire mountain
’s glow diminished, a thick fog vomiting forth from its sundered summit and sweeping down its slopes with impossible speed.
Next to Vaelin the wolf gave a soft but urgent whine, nuzzling his hand and pressing him closer to the stone. He reached out to it, though found he couldn’t look away from Lionen, now kneeling with his arms spread wide, the burning ash sweeping towards him in an unstoppable black tide.
“My sister spoke my name!” he cried out as the ash crested the mountain top and swallowed him. The heat was unbearable, the ash choking as Vaelin pressed his hand to the stone …
… he blinked, the instant change in the air making him gasp. His eyes went to the spot where Lionen had been kneeling a second before, embracing his death. The stone was bare, without the faintest sign of his passing.
“What did you see?” Erlin asked, his brow creased in an uncertain frown. “It kept you. It must have shown you something more.”
What greater power is there? Vaelin looked away, finding the confusion in Erlin’s eyes hard to bear. I will not do that. He moved back from the stone and started towards the steps. “As you said, we have much to think on.”
Lorkan blinked into existence and slumped down beside Vaelin, ignoring the agitated murmur from the Sentar. Astorek’s wolves also began a distressed chorus of whines until he calmed them with a look. “I’d guess about five thousand people,” Lorkan said. “All crammed into the guts of that mountain.” He pointed to a steep-sided peak little over a mile away, a jagged scar visible in the rock a third of the way up its flank. “I didn’t go too far in, but saw enough to know they’re in a grim state, plenty recently wounded, some dying. Perhaps half are children. The older ones don’t seem to be getting on, sitting in different groups and glowering at each other.”