The Red Queen
Authors: Isobelle Carmody
Isobelle Carmody is one of Australia’s most highly acclaimed authors of fantasy. At fourteen, she began
Obernewtyn
, the first book in her much-loved Obernewtyn Chronicles, and has since written many works in this genre. Her novel
The Gathering
was joint winner of the 1993 Children’s Literature Peace Prize and the 1994 CBCA Book of the Year Award, and
Greylands
was joint winner of the 1997 Aurealis Award for Excellence in Speculative Fiction (Young Adult category), and was named a White Raven at the 1998 Bologna Children’s Book Fair.
Isobelle’s work for younger readers includes her two series, The Legend of Little Fur, and The Kingdom of the Lost, the first book of which,
The Red Wind
, won the CBCA Book of the Year Award for Younger Readers in 2011. She has also written several picture books as well as collections of short stories for children, young adults and adults.
After living in Europe for more than a decade, these days Isobelle divides her time in Australia between her home on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, and Brisbane, where she is working on a PhD at the University of Queensland. She lives with her partner and daughter, and a shadow-black cat called Mitya.
The Obernewtyn Chronicles
Obernewtyn
The Farseekers
Ashling
The Keeping Place
The Stone Key
The Sending
The Legend of Little Fur
Little Fur
A Fox Called Sorrow
A Mystery of Wolves
A Riddle of Green
The Kingdom of the Lost
The Red Wind
The Cloud Road
The Legendsong
Darksong
Darkfall
The Gateway Trilogy
Billy Thunder and the Night Gate
The Winter Door
Picture Books
The Wrong Thing
Night School
Scatterlings
The Gathering
Green Monkey Dreams
Greylands
This Way Out
(with Steve Taylor)
Alyzon Whitestarr
For Tash,
First to join me on this final part of Elspeth’s quest,
she did not live to reach its end. I have used my pen
to draw her into the story. In the end we are all
only the stories we journey in . . .
‘Drink slowly. Your body is unaccustomed to wakefulness,’ said a cool, unfamiliar, masculine voice. Something cold and wet touched my lips and I flinched, opening my eyes to darkness so complete that I could not see the man tending me. I tried to speak, but my mouth would not shape the words. I tried moving but my body would not obey me. Fighting panic, I formed a farseeking tendril, determined at least to probe the stranger’s thoughts for answers.
The effort made my head spin, and the probe dissipated uselessly. I fought down terror at the realisation that I could not use my Talents or move or smell anything. I could hear and feel, I told myself firmly, if no more than the agitated hammering of my own heart. I was stretched out on a smooth, flat, surface; not a bed, but some sort of padded bench.
Yet I had absolutely no idea how I had got there.
Inchoate fears swirled in my mind until my fingers spasmed. That brought a wash of relief, for it suggested my paralysis might be only temporary. But it also told me that it was not merely weakness preventing me from moving. There were bands across my wrists, ankles, hips, chest and forehead, holding me immobile.
I was a captive.
But why would anybody bother restraining someone so weak they could barely lift a finger?
Willing strength into my hands, I stretched out my fingers to their fullest extent. The tips on both sides brushed a smooth curved surface. I relaxed for a moment then stretched out my toes, straining at the ankle bindings until once more I felt the same curving surface.
The touch of a cold metal rim against my lips again startled me and when the band around my forehead loosened, I thought for a moment that I had weakened it. Then a large hand cupped my head and tilted it gently so that I could drink more easily, and I realised my captor had loosened the binding.
I drank greedily, for I was terribly thirsty.
‘Who are you?’ I managed to croak as my head was laid down again, and the band around my forehead tightened once more.
‘I am one of the Tumen that serve God,’ my attendant answered tranquilly.
‘God?’ Fear jolted the word from me, because God was an archaic Herder term for Lud. The thought that I might have fallen into the hands of fanatical Herder priests horrified me, but the sect had been completely overthrown by rebels both in the Land and in their Norseland and Herder Isle strongholds. Effectively there
was
no Herder Faction any longer. Of course it was possible one or two of the warrior priests remained at large and might have joined renegade soldierguards and rebels who had served the traitorous Malik. All three groups had an avowed hatred of Misfits and might have made common cause.
Yet it was impossible to believe that my serene, meticulous attendant was one of their ilk. But if the man was not a Herder, then why had he taken me captive?
I tried again to think what had happened to me. My last memory was of journeying in the high mountains above the Valley of Obernewtyn with Gahltha and Maruman. I had a clear recollection of the too-thin air in the high passes that had made my ears sing and my head ache, and I could vividly recall the way the icy wind had stung the tip of my nose. But I could not remember my purpose in that journeying.
I felt a movement at my side and gathered myself to ask, ‘Why have you bound me? I am too weak to try to escape.’ Despite the water my throat felt very dry and sore.
‘You are not a captive,’ the Tumen said calmly.
‘Then why am I tied up?’ I growled, nettled by the obvious absurdity of his words.
‘You have proven resistant to the cryopod mechanism and have been immobilised to prevent sudden movements that might result in physical harm before a receptive sleep can be facilitated,’ he answered.
I had no idea what a cryopod was, but once in a past-dream, the Beforetime teknoguilder Doktaruth had spoken of experimental cryosleep pods within which animals and birds fell into a death-like sleep, but one from which they could wake days or months or even years later, unchanged. In my dream, Doktaruth had told Cassy of new human-sized pods. Why anyone would want to put people or beasts to sleep for long periods, I could not guess, but it was quite possible the use of cryosleep pods for humans had progressed to common usage. After all, I had no idea how much time had elapsed between the Beforetimers’ conversation in my dream and the Great White that had ended their world.
But if this was a later version of Doktaruth’s human-sized cryosleep pod, why had the Tumen put me into it?
I shivered at the thought that I had been inside a cryopod, subject to its power to invoke an unbreakable deepsleep. Yet it would explain the long nightmarish period of sleep from which I had fought so hard to wake. In truth, it had been only my ability to draw on the deadly spirit power at the bottom of my mind that had enabled me to break free of it.
I strove again to recall what had happened to bring me into the hands of the Tumen, but there was a wall in my mind obscuring whatever had happened between my travels in the high mountains and my waking here. Dragon’s subconscious had built a wall in her mind to protect her from the memory of her mother’s brutal death, and I wondered uneasily what terrible thing might have happened to provoke my mind to do the same.
As if in answer, a vision came to me of Dragon lying with her eyes closed fast, her beauty striking as ever, but marred by a dark rainbow of fading bruises and healing cuts. Her eyes opened, and the corners of her swollen lips lifted in a smile before the vision faded, leaving me bereft and utterly confused. There had been love and recognition in the girl’s eyes, though my last clear memory of Dragon was of her glaring at me in uncomprehending fear and hatred after I had broken down the wall in her mind to bring her out of her months-long coma, only to discover she retained no memory of her years at Obernewtyn or of our friendship. She had known me only as the person responsible for the pain she experienced when she remembered her mother’s murder. Ironically, the memory, long suppressed, sank once more when she regained consciousness. All that remained to her had been the long, lonely, feral years of her childhood, haunting the Beforetime ruins on the West Coast.
The futuretellers and empaths had insisted her lost memories would return and were merely temporarily submerged by the trauma of assimilating her mother’s betrayal and death. But Dragon had disappeared before that could happen, and we had searched high and low to no avail. The only news of her since had come obliquely from the Westland where the futureteller Dell had seen a vision of Dragon returning to Oldhaven, which had been the Beforetime ruins she had inhabited for so long. But she had been frightened away by the work being undertaken there before anyone had spotted her.
After the first stab of sorrow, I found the vision of Dragon awake and smiling lifted my spirits. Whether a memory of something I had forgotten, or a glimpse of the future, it meant that Dragon had remembered me and all I had been to her, or would one day. And if it
was
a future vision, then it meant I
had
a future beyond this suffocating darkness.
Determinedly, I immersed myself in the memory of travelling in the mountains in the hope that I could learn how I had fallen prey to the Tumen. When I was so deep in the memory that I all but felt the wind whipping at my hair, I experienced a sense of solemnity that convinced me I had travelled to the mountains for some specific and important purpose. Given there were no human settlements in the taint-streaked heights, the most likely reason for my journey would have been to consult the Agyllian Elder, Atthis. The ancient bird dwelt in an eyrie atop an inaccessible stone tor in the high mountains, and the only time I had gone there, I had been carried in a net, delirious and near death. But I might have set off anticipating that Atthis would foresee my need and send fliers to fetch me. Or
she
might have summoned me, in which case fliers would have been waiting for me.
Another vision came to me of a queer, domed building, white and radiant atop a high ledge bathed in sunlight. It was obviously a Beforetime building and the mountain peaks rearing up darkly around it told me it was almost certainly somewhere in the high mountains. Perhaps the Tumen dwelt in some secret mountain enclave, and I had stumbled on it. I had a fleeting memory of scaling the high cliff beneath the white dome, but even as I tried to coax it out, I experienced the sickening sensation of falling. Then nothing.
Was that what had happened? I had seen the shining white building and tried to climb up to it, only to fall? A blow to the head might well have affected my memory and blinded me, and if the building was inhabited by the Tumen, might they not have found me unconscious and injured, and brought me inside? But why put me into a Beforetime device and try to make me sleep?
The question finally opened a crack in the wall of forgetting, allowing three disconnected memory fragments to blow through my mind like leaves carried on a gust of wind: I heard Maruman bidding me look, and when I obeyed, I saw the Herder-bred guard dog Darga on the misty path below my turret window; then I was crouched beside a shining, steam-wreathed pool surrounded by dense greenery, a silver-white wolf gazing balefully at me across the water. In the third vision, I was standing on a slope of eroded rock, capped and gloved against the icy wind, snow flying over me from higher peaks in a glittering arc, the Sadorian tribesman, Ahmedri, beside me.
The crack closed, but the disconnected visions had made one thing clear. Darga’s presence meant that I had not travelled to the mountains merely to consult Atthis. I had been summoned to leave Obernewtyn to begin the final stage in my long quest to find and disable the Balance of Terror weaponmachines that had destroyed the Beforetime, for Atthis had told me the Herder dog would reappear only when it was time for me to leave Obernewtyn forever. This had seemed a macabre riddle, for Darga was thought to have perished in the firestorm that killed his beloved human companion, Jik. But the Agyllians had saved my life when I was near death, so Atthis must have intervened to save Darga. But why had she not simply said as much? As to why Atthis might want to see me, that was clear now, too. She had long promised we would meet and talk one last time before the final part of my quest, and I must have been on my way to that meeting when I encountered the Tumen.
But where did the Sadorian tribesman fit in? Picturing Ahmedri’s handsome, sullen face, I wondered if the answer lay in the task set him by the overguardian of the Sadorian Earthtemple: to find his brother’s bones and return them to Sador. The overguardian had told him I would lead him to his brother’s bones and so he had insisted upon accompanying me whenever I left Obernewtyn. Perhaps he had simply followed me up into the mountains.
This thought roused a memory of my furtive departure from Obernewtyn, under the cover of night and a thick, white mist, mere days before I was to depart for the Red Land as part of the expedition being mounted to prevent an invasion foreseen by the futuretellers. I felt a stab of pain, for I had left like a thief in the night because Atthis had commanded that no one must know I was leaving.
I recoiled from the memory and turned my attention to the four ships that journeyed to the Red Land on a quest to protect the Land, Sador and the Norselands from the Gadfian horde that had invaded and enslaved the Red Land. Neither the Sadorian overguardian nor the futuretellers offering this prediction had said how a mere four ships could stop the Gadfian horde, but the obvious answer had been that Dragon would accompany the expedition. As the long-lost daughter of the queen who had once ruled the Red Land, she was the natural heir to the throne, and her striking resemblance to her mother seemed to fulfil a prophecy that the Redlanders would win back their freedom only when the Red Queen returned. Seeing her, they would rise up and overthrow their invaders.
I had intended to accompany Dragon to the Red Land, for aside from my affection for the girl, I had come to believe that the fulfilment of my own quest lay in that hot and distant land. Despite leaving Obernewtyn so secretively, I had still anticipated joining the expedition, for the futuretellers had seen Dragon and me together there. But some time after my midnight departure from Obernewtyn, Maruman had told me that I would not travel to the Red Land with the four ships. I would never return to Obernewtyn or the Land again.
Even as Dell had foretold, I had left all I loved when I set off to fulfil my quest.
Certainly I had
not
loved the dour Ahmedri, and I could clearly remember my fury when he insisted on following me around in the belief I would lead him to his brother’s bones. Yet the fragment of memory I had of us in the mountains together meant we must have come to some sort of accommodation.
With a shock, I remembered that the tribesman had not been the only one to follow me. The Twentyfamilies gypsy leader Swallow had come to the mountains too, accompanied by the wilful daughter of the cruel and corrupt Councilman Radost who had dominated the Council that once ruled the Land. And there had been dear, blind Dameon and the strange young enthraller, Gavyn. They and their beast companions had been waiting for me when I arrived at the Skylake, deep in the high mountains, all save Ahmedri claiming to have been called to accompany me by a voice that had spoken to them in their dreams.