The Born Queen Part 30

He was answered by a thunder of incomprehensible words that seemed to roll around him, a gibbering no human throat could make. Part of him was fascinated despite the horror. Was this the language of demons?

"I can't-"

"Hush."

It went in his head like a pin through an insect. His mouth froze open.

"Is this the one?" the thing went on. "Are you the one? Are you shadow or substance?"

The voice was burring right in his ear-in both ears, in fact, as if whoever it was somehow was whispering in them both. It didn't sound like a human voice, but he couldn't say exactly why.

Stephen still couldn't move his mouth, so he couldn't answer.

"The smell of you," the voice continued. "Revolting. I don't understand how you don't take your own lives from that alone."

It paused, and Stephen had the sense of something immense slithering around him. But when it spoke again, its voice was still right in his ears.

"You smell of other things, too. You stink of the sedoi. It all rots in you, mayfly. All comes to you to rot. Or will."

Stephen was s.h.i.+vering uncontrollably. He still could move his limbs, and he did-to roll up into a ball.

"Hold still," the voice commanded. the voice commanded.

Then he couldn't move at all, although the trembling in his limbs continued.

Suddenly the needle through his mind began to wiggle, and he was standing in front of the fane of Saint Ciesel in the King's Forest. The forest rose up around him like columns supporting the cloudy sky. The fane was a tidy little structure of gray stone with a low-vaulted roof.

He blinked. He was staring at a different fane, that of Saint Woth.

And then he didn't have time to blink as he flashed from place to place and from time to time. He was nine, looking off the cliffs behind his house and smelling the sea. He was watching Zemle pull off her s.h.i.+rt. He was relieving himself behind a bush off the Old King's Road. He was watching Aspar kiss Winna.

Part of him understood that these were memories, but it all felt absolutely real: The weight of himself on his feet s.h.i.+fted-sometimes he wasn't on his feet-the scents, the temperature of the air, and it all went faster and faster until his thinking mind suddenly stepped away from it all, watched it flow like a river. Not trying to recognize anything but just watching it ripple and move.

And after a moment he noticed another stream, deep and dark, running alongside him, almost touching, then joining and broadening the river.

What's this?

But then even his ability to form questions disintegrated.

It took him a long time to understand when it was over, that he was back in one place and time, still s.h.i.+vering in the dark and paralyzed. He realized that the thing was talking to him again, and probably had been for some time.

"...going through it? Nonsense. I feel the bones. The bones are there. And blood in them, yes? In them. Ah, you're back. Listen, mayfly. He doesn't know me, not for sure. I like it that way. I think you will, too. So helpful, isn't he? Do you ever wonder why he wants you to walk the faneway? Do you ever wonder that?"

Yes, Stephen tried to answer. Stephen tried to answer.

"Come, tell-ah, wait. I see. It's already working. You may speak in response to my questions."

He felt something like a knot untying in his throat, and he gagged and then vomited. He kept heaving long after there was nothing left in his stomach.

"Answer my question," the darkness snarled.

"Yes," Stephen replied through his gasping. "I've wondered." He wanted desperately to ask who he was speaking to but found he couldn't.

"Do you know who who it is?" it is?"

I won't tell you anything, he thought. "I won't tell you that I think it's the ghost of Kauron." he thought. "I won't tell you that I think it's the ghost of Kauron."

He suddenly realized that he'd said what he was thinking out loud, and he groaned. What sort of s.h.i.+necraft was this?

"Kauron?" it said. "That's a name. That doesn't mean anything. Do you know who who he is?" he is?"

"That's all I know," Stephen said, feeling the words rush out of him. "He helped me find the mountain and the faneway."

"Of course he did. No one wants you to walk that path more than he."

Stephen didn't bother trying to ask why.

"Well, walk it you will," the voice purred. "I have no objection."

Stephen felt the beat of wings and a rush of air. He uncoiled like a spring and then went loose, the shaking finally easing out of him.

Stephen lay there for a while, sick at heart, wondering how he ever could have imagined himself brave. It was the same old story: Every time he was close to feeling in command of himself and his world, the saints showed him something to shatter him again.

He opened his eyes and found that the witchlights were back with him. He was still somewhere beneath the earth but no longer in the vast open canyon where he had been abducted; nor was the river anywhere within sight, although he could hear it somewhere, far away.

He couldn't hear anything that might be his companions either, even with his sedos-touched ears. He called experimentally, not expecting a response and not receiving one.

He tried not to think about the very plausible explanation that they were all dead. They couldn't be, because that would mean Zemle was dead, and she wasn't.

So where was he?

The cavern was very low-roofed, so much so that he couldn't stand, but it went on farther than the witchlights revealed in every direction.

Anne Dare had described a place like this; she had called it the "stooping room." Had his kidnapper actually brought him to the start of the faneway?

Kauron, where are you now?

But there was no answer.

He didn't feel like moving. He didn't feel like doing anything. But after a moment he did, coming up to his hands and knees. He picked the direction where he seemed to feel the faneway most strongly and started toward it.

He didn't have to go far. A column of stone appeared ahead, about as big around as a large oak tree. Scratched into it was the old Virgenyan symbol for "one."

He paused. He had never encountered a sedos underground before. Above ground they usually appeared as small hills, though sometime they were rock outcroppings or depressions. What saint had left his footprint here, and how was he supposed to approach it properly? The faneways of the Church had shrines with depictions of the appropriate saint to help prepare the mind and body to receive his power. Here there was no such clue unless the number was some sort of cipher. But it probably just meant that this was the first place he was supposed to visit.

How had she she known the order? Her journal didn't say. known the order? Her journal didn't say.

Feeling weary, he crawled toward the sedos.

When he reached it, he stayed on his knees and reached toward the stone.

"I don't know what saint you are," he murmured. "Else I would come to you properly."

Maybe it didn't matter. The Revesturi-those renegade clergy who had helped Stephen find this place-claimed that there were no saints, that only the power was real.

He touched the stone.

Something pushed through his fingertips and ran down his arm. He gasped as it clamped around his heart and squeezed. squeezed. He braced himself for the agony, but although everything in him warned him that pain was coming, it didn't. He braced himself for the agony, but although everything in him warned him that pain was coming, it didn't.

He rocked back on his haunches as the sensation faded. His skin tingled lightly. An incredible sense of well-being seemed to wash down from his head to his toes.

All his pains-small and large-were gone, and although he remembered that a few moments before he had been on the verge of absolute hopelessness, now he couldn't even imagine feeling like that.

He touched the stone again, but the experience didn't repeat itself.

Neither did it fade. He felt a smile tickle his face.

Why had he put this off? If this was any indication, walking this faneway was going to be a lot better than walking the last one.

He started off for the next station, which he now could sense as clearly as a voice calling him.

The roof dropped lower and lower as he progressed so that eventually he was crawling on his belly, his nose almost on the stone. A distant part of him felt claustrophobic, but it never became overwhelming. He felt too good, too confident that things were going his way now. Besides, at least two people had done this before and survived.

Soon enough his certainty was justified as the floor began dropping away. The walls came in, and soon he was back in a tunnel, albeit one moving downhill in a series of broken steps.

How long since a river had flowed through here? How long had it taken to cut the rock? An unimaginable period of time, surely.

How old was the world?

It wasn't a question he'd thought much about. To be sure, there were scholars who had, and he had read the basic texts in his essentials at the college. There was plenty of speculation, but it fell into essentially two major schemes of thought: The world was created pretty much as it was a few thousand years ago, or it was very, very old.

Then as now, Stephen's love for languages and ancient texts had been his central preoccupation, and the oldest texts in the world were only about two thousand years old. That was when Mannish history had begun. But there had been a Skasloi history before that, one that no one knew much of anything about. How long had the Skasloi kept slaves? How long had the Skasloi civilization existed? What was here before them, if anything?

These suddenly seemed to be very important questions, because it seemed to Stephen that the world had to have been around for a long time for water to dig channels through stone, abandon them, dig new ones, and so on. The saints certainly could have made caverns when they made dry land, but why make them appear as if they had been formed by natural processes that ought to take many thousands of years? They could do so, of course, but why?

And if there were no saints, if the power was just something that was, was, how long had how long had it it been here? Where had it come from? been here? Where had it come from?

How many times since the beginning of the world had someone-or something-walked this faneway, and what had happened?

The thought literally arrested him. So far as he knew, only Virgenya Dare and Kauron had walked this path. Virgenya Dare used the power to conquer and eradicate the Skasloi. Kauron didn't seem to have survived to use his power. If he had, he surely would have stopped the rise of the d.a.m.ned Saints, the Warlock Wars, and the unholy reign of the Black Jester.

Virgenya Dare had saved the Mannish and Sefry races from slavery. Kauron had died and failed to prevent what was in many ways a rebirth of the Skasloi evil. Now it seemed chaos and night were coming again, and it was his task to walk the fanes, wield the power, and set things right.

Could it really be that simple? Was he really the one? Would he succeed-or fail as Kauron had?

He shook his head. Why hadn't the Skasloi walked the fanes? They must have known about them. How could they not?

"Because the saints love us, us," Stephen said aloud. "They love what is right and good."

But that sounded so silly that he suddenly knew for certain that he didn't believe it anymore.

The next fane was a pool of very cold water. He approached it without hesitation and thrust his hands in, and in an instant he heard a voice. The language was a very ancient form of Thiuda, but before he could cipher it out, it was joined suddenly by ten more voices, then fifty, a thousand, a hundred thousand. He felt his jaw working and then didn't feel much at all as his mind shouted to be heard, to stay different, to not be swept away in the ocean of weeping, pleading, screaming, cajoling. Now it was all one sound, a single voice saying everything and thus nothing, thinning, rising in pitch, gone.

He blinked and yanked his hands from the pool, but he knew it was too late because he could still hear that final tone, itching far in the back of his mind, waiting.

Waiting to swallow him.

And even as he tried to force the voices out, they were starting to emerge again, not from the pool this time but from his own head. And he knew that when they did come back, his mind would be swept away.

All fanes have a limit. All fanes have a demand. They take and they give. If I don't finish this in time, the voices will make me one of them. My body will starve. I'll never see Aspar or Winna or Zemle again.

He pushed himself up, trying to keep his panic down as the susurrus slowly waxed.

I finish, then. I finish.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

ZO B BUSO B BRATO.

THE GUARDS took Cazio down several halls and through the kitchens, where red-faced women in tan ap.r.o.ns and white head scarves labored about a hearth big enough to walk into without ducking. He wondered briefly if they meant to cook him or at least threaten to, but they pushed him on through the kitchen just as the scent of boiled beef and green vinegar sauce began to waken him to how very hungry he was. took Cazio down several halls and through the kitchens, where red-faced women in tan ap.r.o.ns and white head scarves labored about a hearth big enough to walk into without ducking. He wondered briefly if they meant to cook him or at least threaten to, but they pushed him on through the kitchen just as the scent of boiled beef and green vinegar sauce began to waken him to how very hungry he was.

He glanced at a large knife on a cutting table, still red from butchering. If he could get his hands on that- The guard behind him jabbed him with his sword.

"No," he said. "Don't think about it. They want you alive, but they didn't say anything about hamstringing you."

Cazio half turned. "There are six of you, and you're still scared of me. Come on. Let me have the knife and you can keep your swords. I'll show the ladies what a man really is. If they ever knew, you fellows have made them forget, I'm sure."

He raised his voice a bit more. "What about it, ladies? Would you care to see a little sport?"

"I would at that," one of the women replied. Her face was a little wrinkled, but in the right places.

"Shut that, you," another of the guards said.

"Why?" the woman asked. "What will you do?"

"You'd best not find out."