The Red Queen Read online

  “Efari means ‘bright ones,’ ” Darga sent, and I relayed this to the others.

  “Garth said Jacob scribed that he had dreamed of a city where shining people dwelt. But what can that mean?” Analivia asked.

  “At the least it means that the city is inhabited,” Dameon murmured. “But why capture a wolf?”

  “What I would like to know is how we are supposed to cross glowing Blacklands without dying of taint sickness,” Swallow said.

  “That is why I am asking you to decide whether you will go on with me,” I said somberly. “The pack leader told me that many of his wolves will perish on this journey, and humans as well. On the other hand, the wolf that escaped survived crossing the Blacklands and established the Brildane, so maybe there is some less tainted way that the wolves will lead us. Maybe they can actually smell where there is weak taint.”

  “That makes sense, for the wolf would not lead his whole pack out if they are going to perish,” Swallow said.

  “The pack goes where its leader goes, maybe,” Dameon suggested, “for he did say wolves would die.”

  “What happens after we get to this city?” Analivia asked.

  I looked at all of them, even silent Ahmedri hanging back a little, and Gavyn, who had come closer to the fire to sit on a rock and croon at the tiny owl perched on his knee. Rasial was crunching at a tough heel of bread Analivia had put down for her.

  I said, “Rheagor told me that beyond the city is a great darkness.”

  “We can’t die there because you still have to deal with Sentinel,” Analivia insisted.

  “Elspeth does,” Dameon said with gentle pointedness.

  “Isn’t what the wolf saw likely to mean that he will die in the city?” Swallow suggested.

  “It might mean anything,” I said impatiently. “The point I am trying to make is that the way I will go will be perilous. Knowing this, you must decide for yourselves whether you will go with me.”

  “The wolf saw us traveling with the pack?” Ahmedri asked, before anyone else could speak. I nodded reluctantly. He shrugged. “Then we know what we chose.”

  There was a finality in the tribesman’s words that silenced us, and when he went to his gray mare, Swallow went, too, and began to check the fastenings on the packs and saddlebags while Analivia looked around the campsite to make sure we had left nothing behind. The owl flapped away and Gavyn wandered back down to the lake to watch her circling it, with Rasial as his pale shadow.

  I noticed Dameon stood facing them and I suddenly remembered that I had meant to ask the empath about the pair when he returned to Obernewtyn. “What do you feel when you are close to Rasial and Gavyn?” I asked him softly.

  “In truth it is very hard to feel anything about one or the other, because their emotions overlap so intimately.” He nodded toward the lake. “I know from the reactions of the others that this Skylake is beautiful to look upon and yet somehow I do not like the feel of it.”

  “You are wise and sensitive, my friend,” I said. “The lake was once a storage place for deadly Beforetime weapons. In a past-dream, I saw great flat doors where the lake now stands. They opened and weapons flew out like a flock of deadly birds. The doors did not close again and I think gradually the rain made a lake of the opening, drowning all that lay beneath.”

  Dameon said nothing, and I wondered why he had been dragged into my quest. Or any of them, save maybe Swallow. The tribesman was canny enough but he had his own reasons for traveling that had nothing to do with my quest. Analivia was clever and quick-witted but she had no Talents, and Gavyn was a strange, distant boy with little ability to relate to human beings let alone the wit to understand what I was trying to do. What had the oldOnes been thinking when they had summoned these five?

  “They come,” Maruman sent, and I looked up to see the wolf pack flowing around the rim of the mist-swathed lake, fur in all shades from white to dark gray, limned silver at the tip by moonlight, their eyes shining pale with a flash of red at the center. They were so beautiful and terrible that my skin rose up into gooseflesh.

  4

  THERE WERE SEVENTEEN male wolves and fourteen females, some little more than cubs, but there were no very old wolves. Descantra was the eldest, and I saw no sign of Gobor One Ear. There were no young cubs either, and though it might just be the season, it might also be that the pack had split. Certainly I had reckoned there to be more of them when Descantra and Gobor had led them to the Skylake. Had some refused to go with Rheagor, or had he commanded them to stay?

  The pack leader came to me. “Come tha and tha pack follow,” he commanded, and turned to lope away. There was a little flurry of activity as we hastened to mount up and follow the wolves. Analivia rode behind Swallow on Sendari and Ahmedri rode behind them alone. He had offered to have Gavyn ride with him, but the boy had refused, setting off at a loose, easy run after the wolves, his face wreathed in delight. Rasial bounded by his side, red tongue lolling. I rode behind on Gahltha, and Darga loped beside us. Maruman lay across my shoulders, sinking in his claws, and Dameon brought up the rear on Faraf. High overhead, the owl soared and dipped.

  We were heading back toward the gorge at the southern end of the valley when some impulse made me turn to look back. The mist had thinned and now the Skylake lay still as glass beyond the trees. Two pale stone mountain peaks rose sharply above the rim of the crater, catching the moonlight and reflecting in the water, and they looked like nothing so much as the horns of some vast dark animal.

  And Jacob’s journal had spoken of horns.…

  We guided the horses over the rubble and into the defile; then the wolf led the way along it until, close to morning, we were standing once more above the valley and looking into it. Bathed in the subtle radiance of moonlight, the lake had an eldritch air. The others stopped to gaze down into it in wonderment, for they had entered the valley from the east and so had not seen it from above.

  “It looks like an eye,” Analivia muttered, and Ahmedri made a warding-off gesture toward her that I had sometimes seen tribesmen make, though never Bruna or Jakoby.

  The wolves continued north, leading us up a low slope to a higher slope. The latter was very steep, but there was another remnant of a Beforetime road cut into it, which eased our passage, though it was narrow enough that we had to travel single file. Now that I had recognized these flat, broken-edged ledges as the remnants of roads, I could not see them as anything else, but the others, who evidently had not encountered any such roads on their journeys to the valley of the Skylake, merely marveled at the flatness of the stone.

  I was debating how to tell them what I had guessed when Dameon suddenly commented that the way was so smooth we might be walking on a road. Then the others stared about with thunderstruck expressions much as I must have done when I had realized the truth. For the remainder of the night, they speculated endlessly about the road and why the Beforetimers would build such a thing in the middle of the mountains. Curiously, although Dameon took part in the conversation, he did not mention my past-dream about the Skylake, which would have given one very good reason why the road might have been constructed. Perhaps he thought I had told him in confidence.

  I half expected the wolves to lead us east out of the mountains and down to the Blacklands. But maybe the city we sought lay farther north, for the wolves set off in that direction, following the ridgeline of the mountain range. It might even be that we must traverse the whole of the range to its distant and unknown end, before descending to the Blacklands to seek a city that lay even farther north. That was a daunting prospect, for the mountains farther along the range were higher than any I had climbed, and they were said to be completely tainted. But even if the taint turned out to be mild, and there were Beforetime roads to ease our passage, it would be very cold and we would have to contend with snow.

  The sky was growing lighter in the east and the stars were beginning to fade when the Beforetime road ended abruptly under another great rock fall, and the way beyond it wa
s broken and difficult to negotiate by moonlight. The ruddy flush of dawn was showing in the east and firing on the peaks of the highest mountains by the time we made our way down the side of a narrow canyon that had looked as dark as a river of shadow from a distance. I found myself yawning repeatedly and struggling to keep my eyes open as we reached the bottom of the gorge and continued along it. I was not especially tired, having slept well the previous afternoon, but I was not accustomed to staying awake all night.

  The canyon widened into a gorge carpeted in a thick, soft white lichen of a sort I had never seen before. At first sight, I thought snow had fallen, even though the gorge was too well protected by the surrounding peaks for it to be snow. Once again I thought we might turn west, for there were many canyons running away from the gorge in that direction, but Rheagor merely led us to where a narrow cascade spilled down the gray stone wall of the gorge into a stream that flowed down a narrow ravine. Darga went to drink from the stream and the others did the same, but Rheagor made his uncomfortable contact and bade me and my pack rest and sleep for the day. He and the wolf pack would return at dusk. He added that if we wished to continue, we should go along the water-filled ravine beside the fall and then head north. He would be able to find us by tracking our scent.

  Before he could sever the connection between us, I asked quickly how many days he thought it would be before we went down from the mountains to cross the glowing Blacklands.

  “Many days,” he sent, and then he broke contact and loped purposefully back the way we had come, the other wolves streaming after him.

  “Wonderful,” I said drily.

  Swallow came to stand by me, yawning widely. “I gather we are to stop. I cannot say I am sorry. This walking all night will take some getting used to. Should we take the packs off the horses?”

  I nodded absently. Once unburdened, the horses refused the oats Swallow offered, Gahltha explaining that the white lichen was very good to eat. When the horses wandered off to graze in a little herd, Ahmedri built a modest fire with swift skill and a small tinderbox. He made a drink with herbs that gave off a strong, strange scent. Filling a mug, he offered it to Analivia, saying the brew would help us relax so that we could sleep, even though the sun was rising. She took a drink, wrinkled her nose, and then shrugged and finished it.

  “I had better have one as well because I need to sleep,” Dameon said, stifling a yawn. “If it was not for Faraf flicking me with her tail, I would have fallen off sound asleep a half dozen times already.”

  I regarded him sympathetically, seeing how it might be a good deal harder to stay awake when one could not look about. In the end, we all drank, and it was only as I finished the bitter dregs of the draught that I realized with dismay that Gavyn and Rasial were missing.

  “Do not fear,” Gahltha sent, responding to my consternation before I could even voice it. “They are only back in the canyon. The funaga pup found something that interests him, but Rasial is with him and she will watch over him.”

  “He has not had anything to eat,” I objected.

  “The dog hunts/the boy forages,” Gahltha sent.

  I decided I was too tired to waste so much energy in worrying. Lying down on the soft lichen with a sigh, I thought how very pleasant it was. The lichen had a delicate scent I had not noticed before. I gazed up at the sky, listening to the others conversing as they prepared a meal and wondering how long it would take us to grow accustomed to being nocturnal. Maruman stepped up onto my belly and stretched out to sleep. I lifted my head and stared at him indignantly, but he stared me down. I noticed Analivia hiding a grin as she turned back to continue her conversation with Dameon and Swallow.

  “If this city Jacob dreamed about was inhabited by people who had lived there since the Beforetime, we would surely know about it,” the empath told her.

  “Unless they chose to keep themselves apart,” Swallow said. “Imagine what it would be like to have lived beyond the end of your world. If they had any means of seeing how the new world had turned out, the sight of the Herders and the Council, not to mention the Gadfian slavers, would hardly have enticed them into wanting to make contact.”

  “I hope you are wrong,” Dameon said. “Because if you are right about them rejecting the world, they are not likely to welcome visitors with open arms.”

  “If they are Beforetimers, they might have healing skills so superior that they can even heal taint sickness,” Analivia said. Then after a little pause she added, “It might also be that only a few people live there. Garth told me once that cities were often the targets when the Beforetimers warred. Maybe most of the inhabitants fled and these efari are just the ones that stayed behind.”

  I was beginning to see why Garth and Fian liked Analivia. She thought and talked like a teknoguilder and she appeared to have taken in many of Garth’s convictions, for all her fights with the Teknoguildmaster.

  “No one would deliberately make war on cities full of people who were not warriors,” Swallow scoffed. “Think of all the children and old folk and innocent beasts who would have perished.”

  Analivia shrugged. “It sounds appalling to me, too, but Garth said that when one of the Beforetime powers was at war with another, it was judged by their leaders that all of their people were at war, whether or not they fought or even wanted to fight.”

  “That still does not tell us anything about the efari,” Swallow said. “What sort of people would stay behind if they thought a city would be destroyed?”

  “Maybe those who had to stay,” Analivia suggested.

  “What door does Cassandra’s key fit?” Dameon asked. He had turned to me, sensing that I was listening. I sat up, cross-legged, and lifted the now slumbering Maruman gently into my lap.

  “I don’t think it can be a key such as would unlock a door,” I said. “I already have a device that is supposed to unlock all doors that stand between me and Sentinel.”

  “But what is a key that does not unlock a door?” Swallow asked curiously.

  “There were many things called keys in the Beforetime,” I said. “One of the small parts of a computermachine is called a key, and tapping on it allows you to communicate with a computermachine. That is called keying. A code is also a kind of key. That can be numbers or words that need to be said or keyed to make a computermachine listen to you. And even in our time, a key can be an answer to a puzzle as well as the code to let you read a map correctly.”

  “So this Cassandra’s key could be anything,” Analivia said. “How will we know how to find it, then, and how will you know how to use it when you come to Sentinel?” Before I could speak, her face cleared. “But of course, the voice will speak in your dreams!” In that moment she reminded me very much of the farseeker Matthew.

  “We must hope the key is with Jacob Obernewtyn’s body, gruesome as that sounds,” Swallow said. “And that he is in a grave with his name scribed on it, though I do not much relish digging up his bones.”

  “What I wonder is why Hannah Seraphim made Jacob promise to keep the key with him,” Dameon mused. “It is almost as if she knew it was important to you.”

  “And where did she get it in the first place? That’s what I’d like to know,” Swallow said.

  “Probably from the place where the Beforetime Misfits were being held captive,” Analivia suggested. “Garth told me she was very concerned about accidents with weaponmachines that had been happening but that she did not think were accidents at all.”

  I stared at her, fascinated. Naïve she might be, but she was clever, too, and capable of putting bits of information together to give her answers. In this case it was the right answer but the wrong reasoning. I said, “There is much I need to tell you about my quest, but I could not tell it all at once, even if there was the time for it. But while we wait for the food to finish cooking, I will tell you of Cassandra.”

  They all turned their faces avidly toward me, and I felt as if I were about to perform a storysong.

  “I am almost certai
n that Cassandra is the younger of the two Beforetime women that you dreamed of when you came to the Valley of the Skylake, Ana, the ones gazing at a computermachine. The older woman was Hannah Seraphim.” Analivia’s eyes widened in astonishment, but I went on before she could speak. “It was Cassandra who gifted the key to Hannah before it was ever given to Jacob. That is why it is called Cassandra’s key. It was also Cassandra who first alerted Hannah about the Beforetime Misfits being held in secret captivity. The reason Cassandra knew about them was because her father ran the Beforetime institution where they were being held captive. It was the same place where Sentinel was being developed. I don’t know how she acquired the key, but I think that the imprisoned Beforetime Misfits helped her.”

  “What a strange coincidence that the Beforetime Misfits were being held in the same place as Sentinel was being developed,” Swallow murmured.

  “Not really,” I said. “You see, the Misfits were captured so that Govamen could find out if their Talents could be used as weapons, and Sentinel was being developed to try to find a way to control people with weapons. The only trouble is that the people developing it had ties to the weaponmakers of the Beforetime.”

  There was a silence as they digested this; then Analivia said, “But if they were making Sentinel to take control of weapons, why develop Misfits as weapons in secret?”

  “I doubt we will ever understand their reasoning,” I said.

  “Was it the Misfits who told Cassandra about Hannah and Obernewtyn?” Analivia suddenly asked. Seeing Swallow’s puzzled look, she explained. “Fian once told me that some of the Beforetime Misfits who used Obernewtyn as a refuge had been stolen from a place where Hannah Seraphim worked, the original Reichler Clinic.” She gave me a questioning look and when I nodded, continued. “Garth told me about it, too. He is very interested in Hannah Seraphim.”