The Red Queen (93 page)

If I climbed up the slope, anyone emerging from their home close enough to see me would likely assume I was seeking my goat. Certainly no one would wonder at my being there. I could climb to the top of the lip and perhaps catch a glimpse of Quarry. I might even be able to farseek Matthew if he was there, unless Quarry was also blocked. It would be worth knowing if it was, for that would suggest that someone had deliberately set out to inhibit the use of Talents in both places. Having heard what the slavewomen said about the reverence the Redlanders had for Misfits, and knowing the Gadfians had no interest in them, this would confirm my suspicion that Ariel was responsible for the block, even if he was not in Redport.

For a moment my mind veered to my earlier thought that Ariel had gone to Sentinel and was even now waiting for me to find my way there, but I shook it off determinedly, knowing there was nothing I could do but to continue with my quest. And that meant finding Cassy’s final message.

The sun was rising now, casting long bright fingers of red-gold light across the red desert, making it glow like live embers when I turned from it and began to clamber up the broken slope, glad I had dressed in men’s clothes.

I reached out to beastspeak the goat as I came level with it, greeting it and asking if it would accompany me to the top of the cliff.

‘Greetings Innle,’ it sent, fixing me with its slotted eyes. ‘My name is Brunt and I will go where you lead.’ He was a male and had a very strong, pungent odour. His mind was surprisingly strong, and I felt it butting against mine as if it was trying to find a way in.

Somewhat taken aback by his greeting, I continued to climb and the goat leapt along beside me, uttering his soft bleat as he told me of the canine that had told him I was in the funaga barud. I thought he meant Darga until he spoke of a boy with a dog, and I wondered with sudden unease if Rasial and Gavyn had entered the settlement. I was tempted to try again to reach the others, but the slope was difficult and unstable, even with grass growing on it, so I made myself concentrate on climbing.

Beginning to pant, for the slope grew very steep, I thought about Rheagor, and of his promise that the wolves would be with me when I faced the end of my quest. His words had been jumbled and his certainty based on visions to which I had no access, but if they were true, where were the wolves? Surely if they had gone along an underground road, they would have found their way out of it by now. I would scry for them the first chance I got, I decided, when I returned to the others. If I failed to locate them that way, I would risk the dreamtrails. I felt bolder, knowing that Ariel was not in Redport. But if he was somewhere in the Red Land, and madness consumed him, he might be roaming as the Destroyer. In that case the risk of encountering him would be very great. Ariel in his right mind did not want to destroy me, but to use me in some way; Ariel consumed by madness and frustration would act without thought or care.

I shivered and stopped to rest a moment, for although the top of the cliff was now close, the remainder of the way was straight up and a true climb. The knowledge that my body would heal itself was no comfort when I imagined earth crumbling underfoot and me rolling to the bottom of the slope, bruised and bloody if not broken. Fortunately the ground at this height was stony, and provided a good stable footing.

I heard the distant tolling of bells, then, and turned to look back at Redport, realising these must be the signal that the curfew had ended. Yet it was still very early; the sun had only just risen and the settlement still lay sunk in its own shadows, the scythe streets appearing to be curving streams of black running to a black bay. But the sun was touching the tops of buildings and the rigging and masts of the greatships anchored there; even as I watched, I saw a purple sail unfurl slightly and flap. There might be other ships with purple sails from lands I had never seen or heard of, but I knew of only one ship with such a sail – the ship from my dream in which Gilaine had been speaking to the diminutive man and his entourage. And I knew the ship was in the bay because the slavewomen had told me the fire festival had been resurrected in his honour, and the emissary had come ashore for it.

I wondered if Gilaine was, even now, aboard the purple-sailed greatship, having been appropriated by the emissary in advance of the ceremonies during which he was to be presented with a flock of beautiful slaves from whom he would choose those to be given to his emperor?

And what of the promised weaponmachine?

Weary of the tumbling muddle of my thoughts on this matter, I sought out the two towers, shining and glittering in a way that would have baffled me had I not been close enough to see the gold and silver tesserae. Seen from this angle, they made no more sense than from any other angle and I wondered if, given this was the place the Red Queen had come to offer herself to her people, the two towers were no more than markers of that celebration.

The decorative dragon was lost in the shadows of the surrounding buildings now, but I could see the top of a rectangular building rising from the shadow, and I felt sure this was where Matthew had seen the carving of the Red Queen.

A gust of wind made me turn back to my climb.

When I reached the top, I was pleased to see that my assumption had been right. I had got onto a narrow lip or ledge of hard ground that was obviously a remnant of what had once been a plain stretching all the way east to the escarpment beyond which the glide had fallen. Looking along the coastline to the north, I could see the ledge gradually widened out and although I could not follow it, I had no doubt it ran out and around to join the escarpment.

Turning east I saw the arc of domes. With the sun rising behind them, they were little more than dark, rounded shapes, but I was again struck by their unnatural regularity. I tried again to reach the others. That my probes to Swallow and Ana would not locate filled me with unease. But ranging farther afield, I found Sendari’s mind and he said that all was well. He had left them in the camp behind the dome making a meal in honour of my return and Mornirdragon had been keeping watch. He also told me that Swallow and the others had gone inside at least one of the domes during the night to get fodder, which he pronounced delicious. His calmness soothed me as did his promise to return to the camp to tell the others I had been trying to reach them, and that I was just north of the settlement.

Sendari agreed to pass on my messages and then he told me that Gahltha had roamed further north with Faraf, where he had found water, if I wanted to beastspeak him. Catching an intimate glimpse of them in the grey horse’s mind, I decided against scrying further for them.

I turned and walked to the edge of the cliff, squinting against a stiff, sea-scented wind. The water at the base of the cliffs was still black, but the sun was high enough to send shafts of light through the top of the Talons, and this set the sea beyond a-glitter, running away in a radiant undulant sheet to the horizon. For a moment I held my breath at the stunning, dramatic beauty of it, and wondered what lay beyond that far horizon. To the south and west the sea was a hazy blurring of land and water that I knew must be the cloud or mist that covered the notorious Clouded Sea. That was the way ships from the Land would come, I thought.

I heard a sound and swung around, heart pounding, to see the little goat bounding up onto a pale stone. He regarded me pertly for a moment and then bounced away a little and jumped onto a rock. I turned to watch as he leapt from it to another, then I realised that these must be the Beforetime ruins the slavewomen had mentioned! Cora had said they were only a remnant of what had once been, but this was so little as to be nothing at all. In truth there was no way of telling that they had once been Beforetime buildings. Moving through the stones, I could make out a few courses laid in rows here and there, half buried in the red earth. One ended in a great lump of what had probably been a cornerstone, but it was too worn for me to be sure. Turning around slowly, I tried to envisage the chambers and passages that would have been formed by the walls, but there was simply too little left of whatever had once been.

The building – or maybe buildings – had covered a lot of ground, and this fitted with what the slaves had said about it being the remnant of a govamen building. That organisation had been in the habit of building vast complexes, and if this were Eden, it would surely have been just such a place. But there was no way to tell if it had been Eden. If there were an object or message for me buried here, I would need guidance to find it.

There was a movement at the edge of my vision and I noticed with dismay that the little goat had leapt onto a lump of white stone right at the edge of the cliff where it bellied out slightly. He turned his horned head to me as if sensing my gaze, and uttered his soft insistent bleat. At the same time, his mind butted at mine, telling me to come. He was a clever little beast, his thoughts evidently as nimble as his cloven hoofs, for as I went to him, I saw that he had taken in my interest in the ruins.

‘Look down, Innle,’ he beastspoke me.

I did and realised I was somewhat closer to the edge of the cliff than I liked. My stomach clenched at the sight of the shadowed waves directly below, swelling and churning around shoals rising up blackly from the water, the roar and heavy thud of the sea breaking against the base of the cliff, the bone-white foam boiling up.

‘Closer,’ he insisted and I was about to refuse when I suddenly remembered that Cora or another of Nareem’s slaves had said there was a better preserved remnant of the Beforetime buildings at the base of the cliffs.

I leaned forward, but still I could see nothing. The little goat was standing at the edge of the chunk of stone, over the drop, looking at me expectantly. Resignedly I got down on my belly and wriggled to the edge of the cliff.

I saw the platform the slaves had mentioned, held high above the churning, swirling waves on thick stone pillars that seemed utterly untouched by the violent sea. I wriggled further out and now I could see the base of the cliffs, which were considerably undercut beneath the part of the cliff where I was lying. I was looking straight down onto the buildings so I could see nothing but the roofs, which appeared to be made of the same pale stone as the chunk the little goat stood upon.

I might see more from further along the cliffs, once the sun began to wester. By my reckoning the platform was a good bit higher than the roofs of the buildings at the base of the cliff, which looked as if they were above the water line. I wriggled out a little further and examined the cliff wall. It was hard to tell in the shadows but it seemed to me there was a remnant of white stonemasonry fixed partway down the cliff wall. This suggested there had been some sort of connection between the building below and the one above, even as the slavewomen had suggested.

I wriggled back and sat on my heels. It was now clear to me why the women had been so sure these buildings had been built in the Beforetime – no one else would have the will or capacity or indeed the desire to build in such precarious places. Most likely the location and the massive disturbance that had caused the subsidence of the great plain had destroyed most of the buildings. Had the first Red Queen witnessed that destruction? I wondered if she truly had been alive in the Beforetime, and had used material from the ruined buildings to begin to construct Redport, and how much of it had existed by the time Hannah and Cassy had come here with the Beforetime Misfits?

I was eager to see what Swallow and Dragon would make of it.

I retreated from the giddy edge of the cliff and stood up, thinking of the sea creatures rumoured to have been held captive here, even as the Beforetime Misfits had been captive, and hoped they had been freed by the same upheaval that had reshaped the land, and not killed. Either way it was a tragedy of the distant past. Even if the building below the roof was somehow intact and had been part of the Eden complex, it had likely been at the mercy of the weather if not the sea for far too long for me to hope that there would be anything left of Erlinder and his work. And even if by some freak chance the buildings did contain something that might help me to locate Sentinel, there was no way to reach them. If this was Eden and Kelver Rhonin had come here, he must have been as disappointed as I was. Yet if he had come, wouldn’t he have found the Beforetime Red Queen?

I dragged my thoughts from the past and told myself firmly that no human could climb down that cliff, and while I might have asked Rasial to have Fey fly down, she had told me clearly that the owl would not fly over water.

As I was about to turn away, I caught sight of a scatter of floating debris far out to sea, slightly to the north, half lost in the flash and glimmer of sunlight on the water. Then I realised it was very far out to sea and was not debris but
greatships
. I counted as many as twenty, and though they were too far away for me to see the colours of their sails, or the direction in which they were travelling, I felt sure they belonged to the emissary, and were either waiting to fetch the slave warriors or, perhaps, to attack Redport if Ariel did not fulfil his promise.

I studied them for some time, then turned to look north where I could just make out a track running away from Redport. But I could not see any settlement in that direction, even from this height. That was puzzling until I remembered that Quarry was a great round pit, where its inhabitants lived in caves around the edge of the ancient quarry, for almost nothing of it would be visible from any distance. It also meant I would be unlikely to be able to reach the minds of anyone there. Nevertheless I could not resist trying to farseek Matthew and then Merret and Jakoby, but I was not surprised to fail.

I would have to ride to the settlement on Gahltha and get close enough to farseek down into it if I wanted to make contact with anyone from the four ships who had been sent to Quarry. It occurred to me that maybe Darga had gone there after abandoning me in Redport, to do what he had told Sendari he was going to do, and get into Quarry. The little goat bleated an enquiry and I asked him to go down again with me. I could see a good deal of movement in the streets now, but very little of it was outside the limits of the settlement. I would be very visible with the sun falling full on the slope. If the goat was with me, I would merely be a lad bringing the little beast back to its shed. Brunt agreed without argument, and made far easier work of the descent than I did.