The Dark Queen

Chapter 1

The Lady shrieked-a shriek that would echo for a century in the Abyss where she hovered on the dark airless currents of chaos. Takhisis furiously snapped her wings and shut her eyes against the vision unfold shy;ing before her.

Where had this warrior come from? How had he escaped her notice?

She had to know. And so, raging, she looked again at the man certain to thwart her plans to enter the world in a shape that was her own and would hold its boundaries amid the physics of Krynn.

He was a tall Plainsman, with unusual sky-blue, no, sea-blue eyes that stared past the flaming walls of her coveted Istar. His face was windburnt and ruddy, with a thick stubble of red beard unusual among his people. He wore a massive golden tore, inlaid with black glain opals, its ends knobbed and twisted at his throat. The opals. So he was protected.

Takhisis guessed him to be about thirty by the faint lines on his handsome, tanned face, by the fine lacing of silver in his auburn hair.

He stood at the gates of a city in flames.

The Kingpriest's Tower burned gloriously, its sov shy;ereign dead, its swarm of clergy defeated and scat shy;tered like pigs. .

Except for one. One white-robed figure held his hands aloft in exultation. She could not see the lone cleric's face, but for a moment a hot wind billowed back his sleeves and exposed the red oak leaf tattoo on his left wrist.

Druid. They were always there to vex her.

Then the vision wavered, brushed by the dark wings of another god.

Takhisis whirled in the blackness of the Abyss, her enemy a faint glimmer at the edge of sight.

Already too far away to follow, to punish.

Speed of a god.

But now all of them-the druid, the warrior, the Plainsmen army-faded from view as black fire washed over her vision.

Takhisis shook with another angry scream, but con shy;tinued to watch as the Plainsman moved into her sight again, his eyes still cool and distant. Now he walked through the burning portals of Istar, to seize posses shy;sion of all that lay before him. And beyond him.

From the way he moved, the sweep of his massive hand, Takhisis knew this man had never seen a defeat, never cried one tear in the humiliation of surrender.

And then, in the Dark Lady's vision, the shifting blue of those confident eyes turned and fastened on her, and for the first time since the Dragon Wars, since the Great Lance had banished her to this swirling noth shy;ingness, she felt the claws of fear rake her heart.

Locked in his stare as the scene dissolved, Takhisis spun in a slow circle, realizing that if she could not destroy him in time his rebel armies would lift her hard-wrought chains from all of Ansalon. This Plainsman would destroy her long and tedious work with the Kingpriest of Istar: her quiet, narcotic presence in the cleric's dreams, the controlled feed shy;ing of her plans into his sleeping mind.

The Kingpriest was more powerful than Takhisis had imagined. More learned in lore and godcraft than any mortal in the history of this world. He had barred all the gods from the face of Krynn-all of them, from high Paladine to low Hiddukel, from Zeboim of the seas to the three lunar children. They could return only fitfully, briefly-faint flickerings in rock crystal, in spindrift, at the blazing edge of meteors, or in the latticework of ice.

Then, when the light faded, the meteor cooled or the snow melted, their worldly stay was over, and they returned to Concordant Opposition, to the Ethereal Plane.

To Abthalom, the Abyss, where they shrieked and glided and waited to return.

But the Kingpriest was mortal. He could not last for long beneath the weight of his own momentous spellcraft.

To bind a god is exhausting work, Takhisis thought with a chuckle. They would find him, sooner or later, gibbering in his tower.

Then it would rain fire, and the gods would return.

But if Takhisis had her way, they would return to find her already in power. They would find her fully enthroned amid her darkest minions, and even the gods would bow to her magnificence.

Already, through her insinuations, the Kingpriest had banished the magic-users, the elves, all bards, and every unorthodox scholar. Philanthropists and intellectuals had been stripped of power and riches, then sold into slavery to the mob of priests who swarmed through the Kingpriest's Tower, seeking favors, preferment, and bribes.

The Lucanesti elves, or what was left of them, the Kingpriest had imprisoned in the opal mines beneath the city, where they slaved to gather more of the fabled glain amid the rising rubble and dust of thirty years' labor.

Next to the Kingpriest, theirs was the most impor shy;tant service to her. For the black glain opals were the key to the goddess's intricate plot.

She had tried to enter the glain opal once.

The gem was filled with moisture, a stony blood that would nourish and sustain her indefinitely in hostile Krynn. Godsblood, the Lucanesti miners called it. She could only imagine the power, the havoc. She would be loose upon Krynn, were there a way to inhabit the stone …

So in a thunderstorm Takhisis had tried to enter the gem, but the flat black opacity blocked and scat shy;tered her energy and light. Shrieking in pain and anger, spread to the eight corners of the air in an explosion of fragmented light, the goddess regath-ered, tried again.

Was shattered again.

The stone was impermeable, proof against her priest-bound energies.

But if the smooth, flawless stone were broken. .

The moisture within it would house her a thou shy;sand years.

Godsblood indeed.

That, too, she would put into the hands of the pli shy;able Kingpriest.

Thirty years in the forming had been Takhisis's plans. Three decades as she drew closer and painfully closer to the moment when disastrous, irretrievable events-Cataclysmic events, she thought, with a sinister smile-would rise amaz shy;ingly out of the Kingpriest's droning, everyday pol shy;icy. It had taken that long to push the city, the continent, the very matter of the world to the edge of a precipice lovely and sheer.

Now she was only five years away, six at most, from that moment when some regular rite or cere shy;mony-a few words changed, along with a power shy;ful magic, and most of all, a fostered, vaunting pride-would collapse the city, the government, the empire, and rend asunder the face of Krynn.

It would be a summoning ritual that would seem harmless and ordinary, perhaps even beneficent to all the clergy by then. But in it, the Kingpriest would chant words that, ten years earlier, he would have found blasphemous, abominable.

He would breathe into the dust of a thousand stones, seeking his dream, his shadow. So that her spirit might move freely in the world long denied her, he would shape her a body from the watery glain dust. And she would be home-on the throne of Krynn, as Istar fell and the world was renewed in chaos.

But all of this would fail, be grievously delayed at best, if the rebels prospered. There Would be no compliant Kingpriest if this bearded Plainsman ever saw his campaign through.

Perhaps no Cataclysm.

How could she have missed him!

Her dark wings fanned the liquid void of the Abyss. Light rushed at her suddenly, as great gaps in the fabric of her prison plane opened briefly, tanta-lizingly on the bright world that Huma and the gods had denied her, and mountains, seas, and deserts rolled under her cold eye.

"There is great power in knowledge, great free shy;dom," Takhisis whispered to herself. Her dark heart yet full of fear, she composed her vast mind to call forth the broken pieces of the Plainsman's history, for in his past, she thought, lay her best weapons against this horrifying future.

The black wind congealed and wavered, and Takhisis spread her wings and rested on its thrum shy;ming current. Scanning the past, searching for the key to this mystery, she saw …. Nothing. His past had been erased.

Sargonnas again.

Oh, she knew the power behind such veil and vanishment.

Quickly the goddess glanced around, her brilliant black eyes flickering over the gloom, the void. Scav shy;enging wings circled at the edge of sight, and a mocking laughter rose from the darkness.

Sargonnas. He wanted to be first as well. But he was a buzzing insect to her, insidious vermin in the barren night.

Takhisis would treat with him later. This red-bearded rebel was more immediate, perhaps more dangerous.

The Plainsman was a hunter, no doubt. They all were. And a fighter-«lse why the great threat to her plans? But there was more. There had to be more.

The past denied her, Takhisis rummaged the pre shy;sent of her new adversary. Scenes of a bright and relentless desert rushed at her. Twice more she brushed away the obscuring wings of Sargonnas. When she bellowed, the rebellious god drew back, tucked into the safety of the void.

She had not even discovered his name. Not yet.

She knew he had some kind of power with words. He spoke, and then the tribe moved, always finding the water they needed in their desert travels. She had watched him as he grew older and changed, his words taking on the colors of war, and his adoptive people gathering to make armies of men who respected him and women who not so secretly wanted him. His enemies-goblin and ogre, Solam-nic and Istarian-fell before him by the thousands. At the end of every battle, there was a new song sung about this hero.

A small blond singer stood ever at his side, unkempt, her beauty masked by dry wind and miles of travel, a shallow flat drum in her hand and a hawk upon her thin arm. Her features were those of the Plainsmen-the high cheekbones, the deep brown eyes with their intelligent fire. Though she was lithe and long-limbed and gracefully formed, she was rough and awkward in movement, as though unaccustomed to the rule of her own body.

She was small, almost elven, and the white-blond hair was odd, freakish among the dark Que-Nara. She was the kind of child they would, during the Age of Dreams, have left exposed to the elements and fates. At their most merciful, they would have left a child such as she with sedentary villagers, where she would live life as a changeling, an oddity, in a humdrum farming hamlet where no one would ever look at her anyway.

But this one was different. Imilus, they called her kind-"gifted outlander." She traveled with the Que-Nara, singing the old songs of their legends, inventing new songs as the stories passed into myth.

There was power in her voice; she could be formi shy;dable …

Takhisis's laughter rumbled viciously in the dark void.

There was history between these two, the hero and the outlander, a subtle energy that surrounded them, creating a space, a distance. The Plainsman ignored the girl's worship and spoke to her sel-domly, foregoing a place beside her at the nightly fires to watch and patrol with his warriors. Occa shy;sionally, he even took other women, indifferent to her obvious heartbreak.

More often he spoke to and fought alongside another: a small Lucanesti male, with the dark braided hair and mottled, opalescent skin of his kind.

This elf was ropy and flexible, a sinewy specimen who would never tend toward extra weight. He wore the leggings and tunic of the Que-Nara, yet his overshirt spoke of his own people-dark blue to ' match the height of the sky, or brown to match the depth of the desert, depending on how you looked at the garment, which way the light caught it.

Another outsider, this elf. And more interesting.

Takhisis chuckled, and the darkness shivered and tilted.

The elf fought without spear or throwing knife or kala. Hands and feet alone were his weaponry-all the protection he thought he would ever need.

Takhisis sighed in relief as the images of these three continued to flicker and dance in the darkness of the Abyss. The opals protected them all, proof against her magic-the tore of the Plainsman, the skin of the elf.

Nonetheless, all of them were outlanders-all treading a very narrow path of acceptance and power in this tribe of clannish, superstitious people. An easy structure to alter, to invade, to break. The pieces of her plan were coming together.

Ah… my fragile, pretty singer, Takhisis cooed to the light-haired girl, your song of Istar's fall at your beloved's hand will never be sung. For he cannot out shy;run me, the little man cannot resist me, and you …

I will shatter your song like glass.

The elf would be easy. Revenge must be what he was after, revenge and freedom for his hostage people.

So it always was for the Lucanesti. In the intricate world of elves, oppression had made them simple, binding them, freeborn and slave alike. She could not destroy them herself-the opalescence of their skin and blood saw to that.

But again and again, the Kingpriest was useful. His mines were filled with the Lucanesti, digging and dying.

Takhisis turned in the great void and laughed low and sweetly. A slight echo of her uncertainty still rang in her ears. She rode the warm, swirling nightwinds of the Abyss through darkness on dark shy;ness, darkness layering darkness until those places where light had fled entirely seemed hazy, almost pale compared to the kind of darkness that sur shy;rounded them-a gloom of the spirit.

Arcing outward in the perpetual blackness, fluttering her pennons, she dropped straight down ten thousand fathoms, plummeting, falling, dreaming, until at length she floated amid a wild, universal hubbub of stunning sounds, a cloud of confused, disembodied voices, drift shy;ing through the hollow dark.

Through that negative plane of terror and chaos, borne on the nightwinds that whirled about her, buoying and buffeting her, indifferent to the contin shy;ual whining and whirring of voices at the edge of nothingness, murmured the hysterical gnatsong of the damned.

She spread her wings and turned in a hot dry ther shy;mal, rising to the lip of the Abyss, to the glazed and dividing firmament beyond which she could not travel. It looked forbidding, mysterious, like thick ice on a bottomless pool.

Like the black face of the raw glain opal.

There, in the heart of nothing, Takhisis banked and glided, aloft on the current of her own dark strategies.

Behind her another shadow glided relentlessly at a safe distance, its own black wings extended like those of a giant scavenger, an enormous predatory bird.

Takhisis's consort, Sargonnas, banished into the Abyss along with his powerful mistress, had hidden in the deepest shadows to observe the same vision billowing out of the darkness. He saw the same burning city, the collapsing tower, and the elf and the girl and the blue-eyed man whom they followed.

And the armies-the irresistible armies-at the outskirts of Istar.

Oh, what Takhisis would not give to destroy this Plainsman hero and his few hundred followers! The upstart rebel was little more than a gifted escape artist now-eluding and fighting the slavers in a desert that his advisors, his oracles, and his own

common sense told him not to leave.

But five years from now, when his strength and judgment had matured, when his numbers had increased by thousands and he stood at the gates of Istar, liberating the countless slaves and conquered peoples, his power would be grown so mighty that not even a goddess could stop him.

The salt flats of the southern desert lay a mile from the boundaries of the Que-Nara's firelight. Called the Tears of Mishakal since the Age of Light, it was an alien landscape to Plainsmen, to barbarians, even to the nomadic desert bandits who skirted its edges with muttered prayers to Sargonnas or Shinare.

Legends had it that those who strayed onto the salt flats rarely found their way back, but wandered the faceless landscape forever. Those same legends claimed that often the unwary traveler was drawn there by the song of the crystals, the contorted, glassy growths that rose from the heart of the flats, through which the desert wind chimed a faint, bizarre music.

None of the Plainsmen camped close to the salt flats, nor did the sentries patrol its borders. Its landscape extended to the blank horizon, as original and pure as it had lain during the Age of Dreams, and the eyes of the Que-Nara, turned north toward the grasslands and the distant Istarian threat, failed to notice a stir shy;ring in a nearby cluster of crystals, a twisted, sparkling tree of salt that began to sway and turn.

In the blended light of the three moons-the white, the red, and the unseen black moon, Nuitari- the crystals boiled and blackened, as though an unbearable heat passed through them, welding facet to adjoining facet until the branching facets melded and slowly took on a new shape.

As faceless as the salt flat, anonymous and half formed, it was nonetheless human …

Or humanlike.

For a moment it hovered between mineral and life, between salt and flesh, as though something in it warred between sleep and waking, stasis and movement. Then hands and fingers branched from the glossy arms, and the features of the face took sudden shape, as though an unseen sculptor had drawn them from the stone.

The woman moved, and the desert shuddered.

She was beautiful, dark and curiously angular, and naked in the black moonlight.

The woman knelt and scooped up a handful of salt. It poured black through her fingers, shimmer shy;ing thin like silk, and she wrapped herself in the new, cascading cloth. Magically, her features soft shy;ened, her skin grew supple and pale, and her amber eyes glittered under heavy, sensuous lashes.

But the hearts of those eyes were black, slitted ver shy;tically like a reptile's.

For a moment the woman stood still and practiced breathing as though it were a new and odd sensa shy;tion. Then she stretched lazily, the silk riding soft and translucent up her pale, perfect legs.

"Oh, too long away," she murmured, and there was a chiming echo trapped in the depths of her voice. "Too long away from Ansalon and from the little world …

"If I cannot be opal yet, I shall be salt."

She walked out of the Abyss, out of the dead val shy;ley and into the pathless desert, the massive weight of her delicate feet crushing the sunbaked mosaic and parting the winds in her passage.