The Hollow Queen (15 page)

It took a few moments, but then finally he saw it in the far distance.

Clouds of what looked like steam rose from the sea in thin wisps, thickening as they ascended into low-hanging vapor that swirled in beautiful patterns, as if an entire sky of thunderheads had plummeted from above into the sea. Beyond that mist, the twisted shell-shaped spires of the university that was the largest building on the island of the Sea Mages could be barely made out at the edge of his dragon sense, piercing the clouds at a distance of approximately five nautical miles.

Ashe took a deep breath of the sea air, a sensation he had not experienced for some time. Bobbing now in corporeal form, he thought back to the one time his father had taken him to the Isle in his youth, on the first of only two voyages he had ever made to the place. It was a rare moment of fond remembrance in this time of war, when his mind and soul were tormented by the absence of his family and the looming death he could feel in the very air of the continent.

The Sea Mages were refugees of the Second Fleet who had chosen to remain on the mist-wrapped island in the middle of the Wide Central Sea when their ships had been beset by the backlash from the storm that had sundered Merithyn the Explorer's ship and many of those of the First Fleet that he was leading. The leader of the Second Fleet, another of Ashe's ancestors on his mother's side, MacQuieth Monodiere Nagall, who led the Second Fleet, offered the survivors a choice of staying on the uninhabited island, which had been called Gaematria by sailors for time uncounted, or continuing back west to the continental landmass that lay at the other side of the Wide Central Sea.

The majority of those survivors chose to sail west with MacQuieth, eventually landing in Manosse, a well-developed nation where they found an easy existence and had blended into the culture, their Cymrian heritage of minimal notice until their ridiculous longevity began to entrench them in the peculiarity and introspective oddness that often accompanied a vastly extended life span bordering on immortality.

The rest had chosen to remain on the all-but-hidden, utterly deserted island, turning their backs on the civilized world and immersing themselves in endless study and invention, which they sometimes shared with the outside world. More often, and increasingly more completely, they had chosen to eschew that outside world altogether, becoming a closed society of immortal but elderly adults, avoiding the contact and open borders that were necessary for subsequent generations to be recruited and propagated.

There are worse things than death,
Ashe thought as he sank back beneath the waves, preparing to embark on the last leg of his journey. It was a notion he had been well aware of for much of his life, but now even more so that he was a father himself.

The concept of living forever without his family was too much to even consider without being driven mad.

*   *   *

If he had thought that sighting the Isle of the Sea Mages was the beginning of the end of his journey to their realm, Ashe could not have been more wrong.

In sufficient time to have come to the beaches of the island repeatedly, he was still finding himself floating in currents leading out to sea, rather than to shore.

After the third time that the sun had risen and he had still not landed, he began to realize that the magic of the Sea Mages had been entwined with the natural geography of the island in preventing strangers from being able to approach the shores. He was beginning to roil in frustration when he felt a song vibrating through his hands. After a moment he recognized the call; had he not been holding the elemental sword of water, he would never have been aware of the song at all.

He had lived with Rhapsody long enough to understand that each living entity in the world sang a song of a sort, a vibrational signature known as a true name, but often the vibrations of those songs were heard only by Namers and were inaudible to the rest of the world. With Kirsdarke in his hand, however, he could hear the unmistakable song of the island before him, ringing through the sea air, shouting its name into the wind, where it was whipped around among the clouds of mist.

Gaematria.

His heart a little lighter than it had been within the darkness of the depths, Ashe sank once more into that darkness and went vaporous again, attuning the sword to the song of the island, pointing its tip away from him and closing his eyes.

Then he allowed the current to carry him toward the Isle of the Sea Mages.

*   *   *

The louder the song of the island grew, the warmer the current ran. Ashe could feel the temperature change while he was still a good distance away; indeed, it seemed to him that the increase in both the heat and the strength of the churning waters that surrounded the base of the island in the depths was possibly artificial in nature, that the Sea Mages themselves may have taken action to disrupt the natural rhythm of the waves as a deterrent that would keep most ships from landing there.

Something about the ferocity of the underwater churning made Ashe recall words that had been spoken to him about the place sometime before, when a First Generationer named Barney, a barkeeper who had known Rhapsody in the old world, revealed to him that the legendary hero from the Third Age, MacQuieth, was, contrary to popular belief and reasonable assumption, still alive. As he was battered about by the ferocious waves, the words came back to him.

How do you think that Gaematria, the island of the Sea Mages, has remained unmolested all these centuries there, alone, in the middle of the Wide Central Sea? MacQuieth guards it from the depths. There is a whole world beneath the waves of the ocean, Majesties, a world of high mountains and deep chasms, of unimaginable wonders, of beings that rarely, if ever, are seen on the drylands. Do not assume because something is not within your senses that it is dead; there are many places in the world for a man to hide if he does not wish to be found.

Inwardly Ashe sighed. While he had found Barney's words to be true regarding the wonders of the Deep, he knew that the original revelation was no longer in fact the case. He and Achmed had witnessed the hero's end as the great warrior wrestled Michael, the Wind of Death, and the F'dor demon that clung to him into a boiling sea.

I am glad for him,
he thought.
The heartbeat that rang like a great bell is silent. He has finally found the peace he longed for. But such an incalculable loss for the world.

Finally, when the raging water began to successfully bar his landing, he let go of all physical form and allowed the current to carry him where it willed. He imagined himself curled up like an infant in the womb, awaiting birth in the warm waves, and gave a mental command to the sword to bring him to the shore.

Moments later, he felt a cessation of the heat, of the spinning and thrashing of the waves. Formless as he was, he sensed a solidity that indicated his presence on a beach or dry land of some sort. A cool wind whipped over him, tickling his solidifying body.

Ashe opened his eyes.

The sky above him was hidden by the formidable mist he had seen from the sea, but beyond that haze it appeared a different color blue than the ocean had been. Ashe inhaled deeply; the air still had the taste of the sea, but was cleaner, calmer. He lay still, allowing heft and weight to return to his bodily form.

He was lying thus when his dizzy dragon sense picked up the thudding presence of steps coming nearer in the sand.

Ashe lay still as two men approached. He had almost regained his solid form when they reached him. The tightly fitting clothing he had worn into the sea was all but dry when he felt the tip of the spear against his neck.

“Who are you?” The words were spoken in a dialect of Old Cymrian, a dead language everywhere else in the world. Ashe smiled in spite of himself. “How did you come to land here? Where is your ship?”

“I am Edwyn Griffyth's nephew,” Ashe replied quietly in his best attempt at the dialect. “I respectfully request that you take me to see him.”

The two men above him stared down at him as the first removed the spear from his neck. They looked at each other, then began to laugh.

“Are you the
Lady
Cymrian, then?” the man without the spear said. “If so, your appearance does not live up to your reputation.” He chuckled at the confusion on Ashe's face.
“Zinkyn,
not
zemkyn.
You just announced yourself as Edwyn Griffyth's niece.”

“My apologies for my poor knowledge of the grammar of long-dead languages,” Ashe said in the Orlandan tongue, irritation rising. “I am not the Lady, but the Lord Cymrian. My business with my uncle is of an urgent nature. Again, I request that you take me to see him.
Now.
”

The unintended ring of authority was in his voice, punctuated by the threatening multivoice tone of the dragon.

The two men, who were attired in loose cassocks, knee-length trousers, and solid sandals, exchanged a glance. “Stay here, please, m'lord,” the one with the spear said. From the folds of his cassock he removed what looked like a long thin shell with the curvature of a conch and stepped away into the wind.

He raised the shell to his lips and began to blow what sounded like a series of half-spoken, half-whistled pitches into it.

Ashe closed his eyes again. He knew that the man was sending a message to the High Sea Mage on the wind, just as he had known that the spear the man had carried was the least of the weapons that man could have used against him, the rest of them magical, so he rested, allowing his body to become accustomed to being solid again.

In what seemed like only a few moments, the man was back.

“My apologies, m'lord,” he said, abashed. “Edwyn Griffyth awaits you in the Hall of Scholars.”

“Your apology will be gratefully accepted if you'll give me a hand up,” Ashe said. “The sand is beginning to seep into my trousers.”

*   *   *

As he followed the two men into the Citadel of Scholarship, Ashe could not help but look in wonder at the exotic architecture of the central building complex in Gaematria.

At the very center of the shining building was a towering obelisk, twisted in much the same way as the shell the guard had used. Ashe recognized it immediately as the White Ivory tower, the only structure that had been present on the island when the members of the Second Fleet crawled upon the shores of the island after the sundering of some of their ships.

The twisting spire had been formed from White Ivory, a type of stone found nowhere else in the Known World. Unlike its cousin, the substance known as Black Ivory, which was utterly dead and inert, and used to hide objects from those instrumentalities that could scry for them, White Ivory was as porous a stone as had ever been seen on land.

The spire had been fashioned by the sea wind itself, whipping for centuries uncounted around and through the mountainous regions of the island. It was said that the obelisk absorbed all of the vibrations carried on the wind across the wide world, bringing news and information to Gaematria, where, until the Cymrians of the Second Fleet came to live there, it was heard only by passing birds and sea lions. The Sea Mages had learned to harness that information, allowing them to keep apprised of the events of the world around them without having to make contact with it.

The obelisk formed the central tower in the Citadel of Scholarship, and the man-made architecture was designed similarly to echo its shell-like form.

Something akin to hope, almost unrecognizable to him, began to pound in Ashe's chest as he followed his escort. The White Ivory tower was the primary reason for his journey to Gaematria; while he would be grateful for the counsel of the Sea Mages themselves, in truth much of their discernment was made possible by this instrumentality.

Finally,
he thought.
This is what will provide answers, a new vision. This is the day the tide will begin to turn.

In spite of having briefly been to Gaematria twice before in his youth, Ashe had never been allowed inside the White Ivory tower, but he had never expected to be; only the very most senior of the Sea Mages, the men and women who were the elders of the academics of Gaematria, were deemed worthy to enter the building. It was the closest thing to a religious sanctuary.

Llauron, his father, had brought him to Gaematria for the first time as a young boy, upon the death of Edwyn Griffyth's spouse, a gentle, thin man named Raeymik, to attend the funeral and commitment to the sea of his ashes. Ashe had met Raeymik before at Days of Convening on the continent, and had always been fond of him; Raeymik alone among the Sea Mages had both an affinity for and an interest in children, attributes that even his own uncle did not possess.

Raeymik had told him stories of the White Ivory tower: how the wind had carved it from the precious porous stone, how the great telescope atop it, through which the Sea Mages could see the faces of the stars and planets in the black night sky above the island, was powered by the tower, and how within it was the power to heal, to see across wide vistas, to know things that were otherwise unknowable. Ashe had remembered the tales long afterward, and when Rhapsody told him of Achmed's plans to rebuild Gwylliam's Lightforge in Canrif, repurposing it as a Lightcatcher, the description of it rang a chime in his memory.

It made him realize that the Sea Mages had their own version of it.

And, in spite of that, they had sent Jal'asee, their ambassador, all the way to the continent to discourage Achmed from pursuing the rebuilding of it.

He shook his head, trying to contain his excitement.

The Lord Cymrian was led rapidly through the Citadel's streets to the Hall of Scholars, a magnificent building beautifully appointed with fulsome libraries, lore collectives, and laboratories, as well as meeting rooms and observatories. He jogged quickly up the stairs that led to the front doors, passing his escort, seized the handles, and dragged the doors open as the men who had found him on the beach stared in shock.