The Gathering Storm

“I pray you,” said Hugh, stepping sideways to avoid the stink, “what is wrong, Zacharias?”



He couldn’t answer.



“Ah.” Hugh groped in the water and fished up a skull patched with tufts of black hair. “I take it these are the infamous wings of a Quman warrior, and this, I suppose, his head. He must have crawled in here to die after the battle. This certainly is no ancient queen laid to rest by her devout servants. Come.” If the matter now floating like scum atop the water disgusted him, he gave no sign of it, although it was difficult to interpret his expression in the shifting light and shadow that played across his face as he moved on.



Sweating and anxious, Zacharias waded obediently after. The tunnel floor sloped imperceptibly upward. The water receded and gave way to a shoreline and grainy earth as they walked cautiously into the darkness. Hugh halted to study the symbols carved into the stone: more spirals and lozenges, and long strips of hatching and even, here and there, dots and lines that looked like a calendar. What if Hugh found another daimone imprisoned here and let it capture Zacharias’ body? He whimpered.



“What was that?” Hugh asked, pausing, then went on.



The tunnel opened into a broad chamber, a black pit made eerie because of the flickering play of their lights over the floor. The walls remained in shadow, and the ceiling lofted so high above them that it, too, was hidden.



“There she lies, poor soul.” Hugh walked a circuit of the chamber, shining his lamp into three alcoves built into the corbeled chamber. Shaking his head, he returned to the stone slab that marked the center of the chamber.



“I had thought I might find Blessing here with her attendants,” he mused, more to himself than to Zacharias. “But perhaps that was a false vision, not a true one. It makes no sense. Why would Sanglant leave his daughter sleeping beneath one of the crowns? Held in safekeeping? Yet I can still find her. Surely that was Liath traveling in the same manner we walk through the crowns. Who was traveling with her? A sorcerer of great power; I felt her power in my bones.” He knelt beside the skeleton laid out on the slab. The dead queen gleamed under the light because the gold that had once decorated her clothing had long ago fallen in among her bones.



“What are these?” Hugh touched a pair of golden antlers that lay on either side of her grinning skull. “Riches! Best we make no mention of this, Zacharias. I see no need to rob the dead. Let her lie in peace.” He leaned forward, still on his knees. “Here, what’s this?”



He reached past her to lift a crude obsidian mirror off the dirt; despite the passage of years, its glossy surface still caught the lamplight and flashed sparks into the concealed depths of the chamber. Where shadows moved.



They walk out of the alcoves, ancient queens whose eyes have the glint of knives.



Zacharias yelped in terror, stumbled, and dropped to his knees into a clot of rotting garments that crumbled beneath his hands. His lamp spilled to the floor, guttering as oil leaked onto the dirt.



“Don’t be frightened, Zacharias,” said Hugh kindly as he lifted the mirror and with an expression of amazement and a clever grin directed light along the walls and up at the ceiling by using the mirror to reflect it. “Of course. Of course, What if she was one of the ancient ones, a mathematicus? What if she used a mirror to capture the light of the stars? Why did Anne never think of this?”



The oil spilled over the ground caught fire and blazed up, and by this light Zacharias discovered himself wrist-deep in a heap of decayed clothing and rusted mail, the remains of a leather belt curled under his fingers and turning to dust as he stared. The fading outlines of a black lion exactly like those worn by the King’s Lions rested a hand’s breadth below his weeping eyes.



“Who’s there?” said Hugh sharply, raising his lamp.



A chill breath of air coiled around them and the fires went out.



There are three of them. They are angry at this intrusion, but they are also intrigued by the exceptional beauty of the one who desecrates their tomb. They have not quite yet forgotten the memory of life that sustains their spirit. They have not quite yet forgotten the sweet perfume of the meadow flowers that bloom in the spring.



Zacharias lost all sense of up and down, and he fell, but only smashed his face into the bundle of clothing that dissolved all at once into nothing until, when he took a coughing, wheezing breath, it was as if he inhaled all the dust of what had once lain there, sucked up into his mouth and lungs.



The blackness chokes him. Salt water bubbles against his eyes and lips, popping in his nostrils. His lungs hurt, but he keeps swimming although the tunnel is entirely drowned. If he goes too far, he will not have enough air in his lungs to swim back, yet what difference does it make? Where else can he go? Without memory, he is dead anyway.