The Hidden Queen (23 page)

There was a boundary between the Arad and Khar’i’id; Anghara sensed when it was crossed. Between one breath and the next it was as though she suddenly had to gulp air through a hairy blanket. The burnoose felt as if it was choking her; she was already lifting a clawed hand to release it, her reason dulled by the solidity of the heat around her, when she felt ai’Jihaar’s urgent touch in her mind, no less sharp and clear in this place than it had been in the open sands of the Arad.

Resist it. It can be resisted. It must be resisted. This place kills without trying. Do not let it force you into doing something foolish.

Anghara’s hand dropped. She squared her shoulders to endure; but in that moment she would have given anything for one breath of the high, clear air of Miranei.

All too soon ai’Jihaar’s repeated references to walking the Stone Desert became painfully clear. They had started out on the sand-covered stone shelf, which they had encountered before, no more than a condescension toward metamorphosis of the one desert into another. But as the last of the Arad’s yellow sand faded away, the true face of Khar’i’id unveiled itself—a black stone plain of loose sharp rocks the ki’thar’en would have trouble enough negotiating while led, but which they had no chance at all of walking with a rider. The ground was hot beneath the two women’s feet as they dismounted, and even the animals, ready under normal circumstances to grumble and complain at the smallest things, were grimly silent at the spectacle of the purgatory which awaited them. Anghara exchanged an eloquent glance with the blind, white eyes of ai’Jihaar, which had been turned toward her—and stepped forward first.

They didn’t stop at midday—there was no point, as there was no peak to the heat, it just seemed to burn on and on at the same impossible, blistering, eternal high. Soon it seemed as though they had been walking forever, Anghara having turned into a plodding automaton whose only tasks in life were to remember to breathe and keep putting one foot in front of the other. When ai’Jihaar eventually called a halt, she had to do it twice before Anghara responded, looking up in surprise to realize the sun was already well on the way to setting. She tried to speak, but her dry mouth could not seem to form the words.

Do not,
said ai’Jihaar.
Khar’i’id is the place Sight was made for.

After a moment Anghara managed to frame her thought, looking up with gray eyes already limned with exhaustion.
How long?

Long enough.

The one time she had made a concession to her pain in the Arad, it had been no more than a trivial groan at seized muscles responding to the punishment of long hours riding an unaccustomed mount, swiftly put aside and overcome. It had lasted only long enough to be turned into something comical, and, from that, into the basis of one of ai’Jihaar’s lectures of the Way. Aside from this, Anghara had never, with word or gesture, expressed the merest hint of a complaint. But now, looking out over the black plain which still shimmered with heat to the oddly blurred horizon behind which a large red sun was slipping slowly, she lifted a visibly shaking hand to press her fingers to her temple, over her securely fastened burnoose.

Don’t let it be too long,
she said quietly into the pain that beat rhythmically inside her skull.
I don’t know how much of this I can stand.

But she rose on the second morning, and walked again.

There was no other sign of life in this place except the two women who moved with weary courage, leading animals whose heads drooped on their necks. Once, it was true, Anghara raised her head to the pitiless sky and saw the huge black wings of a desert vulture riding the thermals far above them—and something stirred in her as she bowed down in the presence of al’Khur, come to them in his deadliest avatar. Another time she had checked her stride, freezing in place moments before ai’Jihaar’s warning exploded in her mind, watching as a gray lizard, his skin mottled with black diamond shapes, slid unhurriedly away from her and into the rocks. This was a beast of Khar’i’id, and from poison sacs behind snake-like teeth oozed a venom which was, if anything, more potent than se’i’din. A trickle of cold sweat born of sudden fear ran down Anghara’s spine, where her robe already clung wetly to her skin. And then she had squared her jaw and walked on.

Khar’i’id took everything. A traveller was stripped to the bone, and then beyond; endurance had to be sought in the deepest places of the self, delving into chasms whose existence the spirit in which they had been riven had not known until the appointed hour on the black plain. Here, there were no secrets. Khar’i’id found steel in a soul, or destroyed it utterly—with the Stone Desert there was no middle ground.

But the deepest abyss hides the greatest treasure. Khar’i’id had its own gifts to bestow on those who stumbled and cried
I cannot!
only to get up and carry on. In the midst of this, the country whose every face was death, lurked a kernel of resurrection. What ai’Jihaar had not told Anghara was that a night walk in this desert many years ago had forged her own soul, and won her the gold robe of the
an’sen’thar.
But the desert gave nothing that had not been suffered for, and there were times when its only reward was suffering. It was not given to those who braved it to know whether the place found them worthy. As ai’Jihaar watched the gently reared child of Sheriha’drin gallantly take on the worst hell the Twilight Country could try her spirit with, she saw her change to meet the challenge, and grieved for the remnants of childhood which would be irrevocably lost in this place. She could not know that this time Khar’i’id held one of its greatest gifts, poised against the hour of ultimate need in which it was to be given.

It was late on their third day in Khar’i’id that the land changed with a startling suddenness, rising into serried ranks of steep hills whose slopes were covered with a loose scree of small, sharp fragments of the same black rocks which covered the plain. The path Anghara and ai’Jihaar had been following—only now did it become obvious that, in the trackless waste, they had indeed been following a path—plunged between these knolls, forming a narrow twisting passage, where their way seemed barred, again and again, with huge tumbled boulders. The air was stale, hotter and more close than ever, trapped in these convoluted passageways where no wind ever stirred; if it had been thick and dense on the plain, here it was almost a solid wall. Anghara fought for every step against an invisible barrier, which seemed to have been placed there for the express purpose of keeping out unwelcome visitors.

It was,
said ai’Jihaar.
Gul Qara lies in the next valley.

Her voice, her presence, were enough to remind Anghara that she was not alone; stifling a sob born both of absolute exhaustion and blessed relief that their goal was almost in sight, she found strength for yet another effort, the last. And then, so suddenly that she almost tumbled headlong down into it, the black hills sloped sharply down into a wide, deep valley with a floor of fine, pale, crystalline sand. Down the very center of the valley marched a double row of closely spaced tall gray pillars. The colon nade began and ended in emptiness, but there was no sign that this place was a remnant or a ruin unless everything else that had ever been here had already crumbled away into the dust and sand at their feet.

There had been something in the sight which had brought Anghara to an abrupt halt at the edge of the slope, and now ai’Jihaar stepped up beside her.

“Gul Qara,” said ai’Jihaar, speaking out loud for the first time since they had entered Khar’i’id. Her voice was rough with the dregs of that silence, and with other things—she had other, older memories of this place.

“The air,” whispered Anghara as though she couldn’t believe it, drinking in her first breath in many days that was somehow not oppressed by Khar’i’id’s heavy heat. There was even—a forgotten luxury, almost—something of a breeze.

“It is said that ai’Dhya of the Winds loves this place,” said ai’Jihaar, pausing to let the clean air of Gul Qara clear away the cobwebs with which Khar’i’id had muffled her mind. “Come,” she said at length, pulling at her ki’thar’s rein and taking the lead down to the valley. “We have tonight, and tomorrow. And afterward, we have two days to cross what is left of the Stone Desert before we reach the Kadun.”

Anghara’s eyes went to the waterskins the ki’thar’en carried. It suddenly looked as if there was no more there than would satisfy the need of another hour, let alone three more days. “How much is there still to cross?” she asked, almost reluctantly. Just as it had been difficult to believe in Sa’alah in the yellow vastness of the Arad, so it was suddenly difficult to believe in the desolation of the Khar’i’id in this gentle place—and Khar’i’id had to be faced again within hours. Anghara had to forcefully remind herself that Gul Qara was waterless, and all the more deadly for the lull of its unearthly beauty.

“Others have made it,” said ai’Jihaar in response to Anghara’s question. As an answer it was unreassuring; but they were now close enough to the pillars to see their true scale. All other thoughts fled as Anghara, with a gasp of awe, tilted her head to seek the top of the smooth, towering column which dwarfed them as they approached. She reached out with all of her power, the gold aura flickering eerily around her head, but this place was ancient beyond words, and empty. Dead, except for the whispering wind which had been the first to greet them, and wove in and out of the pillars and stirred the sand around the massive plinths. A wind which sounded oddly familiar, even though she could not quite remember where she had last heard its like.

“What are we seeking here?” she said at last, turning back to where ai’Jihaar had tethered their ki’thar’en a little way off.

“You do not seek in this place,” ai’Jihaar replied, without lifting her head. “Even in the days when it still spoke, the Oracle gave what answer it wanted to give—and it was hardly ever something that matched what had been asked of it. But if the supplicant came here open to whatever the Oracle offered, he would often walk away with wisdom to satisfy all the questions which had never been asked.” She paused, her small hands stilling for a moment at their task. “If it gives, it will give freely. Be ready, and be near…”

“But you say it has been silent for so long…”

“Yes,” said ai’Jihaar. “But that was before you came.”

Anghara looked at her sharply. “You said our coming here could mean everything—or nothing,” she said, reminding her of words spoken in an Arad Khajir’i’id hai’r only a few short days before.

“That is true,” said ai’Jihaar with the insufferable calm of the seer waiting for the unravelling of a double-edged prophecy which would come to pass whatever interpretation had been placed on the words in which it had been couched.

“But…” began Anghara again, rebelliously.

The older woman lifted a peremptory hand to silence her. “Be ready, and be near,” she repeated. “All I know is that it was important for you to come. But first, let us eat.”

Despite all her protestations, Anghara had been standing on the threshold of the colonnade in deep fascination ever since they had dismounted from the ki’thar’en. Now she tore herself away somehow and helped ai’Jihaar set up a makeshift camp.

Night fell quickly. They had lit no fire, but did not lack for light—there was a big, soft moon and the stars were as clear and close as they had been on her first night in Arad Khajir’i’id. The pale sand on the valley floor seemed to pick up the light and diffuse it, with even the black slopes of the hills of the Khar’i’id glowing with a faint, reflected luminescence. It was as though the two of them lay in a bowl of moonlight, the shadows of the pillars, etched long and sharp, falling away from them toward the head of the valley.

Judging by her even breathing, ai’Jihaar seemed to have fallen asleep quickly but Anghara was an empty chalice, drunk dry of everything but the bitter dregs of her exhaustion by the pitiless desert beyond this hidden valley. She lay wakeful, and almost preternaturally alert. The maddeningly elusive wind sighed in and out of her memories, finding no place to rest there, and at last she left her blankets and walked barefoot across the cool sand toward the first pillars of the colonnade.

If she stood precisely midway between the two rows of pillars, she could reach out and brush them with the tips of her outstretched fingers; the stone was as smooth and silky as skin to her touch, worked in some ancient way which had long been lost. The floor of the colonnade, underneath a thin layer of sand, was also smooth and cool beneath the soles of her naked feet; it felt like polished tiles. She stood poised for a moment on the edge of the colonnade, fingers of each hand resting lightly on the pillar on either side of her, and then the wind, seductive and compelling, made her take a step into the empty corridor between the mighty pillars. And another. Her mind was clear; a patch of tile lay revealed, free of sand, at her feet, and she knew she would remember its pale, pearly gray color for as long as she lived. And it was as Anghara stood there in the moonlit silence, bright hair spilling loose over her shoulders, that the miracle happened.

There, in the middle of the desert, the wayward, eerily familiar breeze she couldn’t quite remember, brought her a sudden and quite unmistakable breath of the sea.

Now she knew the soughing wind—she had first heard it as ai’Jihaar had named the Empty Quarter in the Arad hai’r where the paths of two caravans had crossed. It surged into a rush of air and blew through the narrow slits between the pillars of Gul Qara like a deep note of music, whipping the sand at Anghara’s feet into small spiral dust-devils. Almost, almost, she thought she could hear a word whispered into her ear as the wind lifted and swirled her hair around her face…And then, in the next moment, it was gone—gone utterly; and Anghara stood in a pool of spreading silence. The same silence she had felt inside her under the pahria palms in that small oasis lost in the yellow sands of Arad Khajir’i’id.

Anghara let her hands drop to her sides, and a curtain of hair fell over her face as she bowed her head. She was trembling all over; it would have been easy, all too easy, to back away from this experience and deny it had ever happened. Easy, except for two things. The vivid, strong, salty tang of the sea was still in her nostrils and came so unequivocally from a place other than the empty, brooding desert waiting on the other side of the sheltering hills; and the triumph blazing upon ai’Jihaar’s face. It was the first thing Anghara saw as she turned, very slowly, to walk back toward the camp along the cold, silent colonnade of Gul Qara.