Chương 43: Chapter 42: When the Queen Returned

Ella walked through the door-gap and didn't stop. I followed. Two steps behind her, the way I'd been since the summit. Inside, the light changed. The two suns came down through holes in the roof in long angled shafts, full of dust, there was a thick layer of dust everywhere. Of course, the stone floor was under there somewhere. What my boots touched was a grey blanket so thick I made no sound at all. In most places, the dust layer was the thickness of my fingers.

Everywhere else it was deeper — drifts piled against the walls like snow, except it wasn't snow, and some of the drifts had layers. A stripe of grey. A thinner, darker stripe. Another grey. Strata. Dust settling on dust, separated by things I didn't want to think too hard about. There had been rain here at some point. Long before I was born. Long before anything I could use as a measuring stick.

The village might have been empty, but it had been protected by something and that must be why the golems were still sweeping, and the books were still soft on their shelves. This place was different. This was a place whose caretaker had died, and died so long ago that nobody remembered there had ever been one. Only the wind hadn't gotten the news. A draft moved through the corridor with us — cold, heavy, going somewhere specific. It pushed at my back and let go.

The dust rolled ahead of it in a slow wave, and where it passed, a footprint from whatever had last walked here half-filled with grey, like the city was sand at the edge of a tide. Ella wasn't bothered by the dust at all, she walked like the corridors were just as she had left them. Left. Right. Left again. Under an arch where the ceiling had cracked open and the sky looked down between the stones. Past doors with no doors. She never hesitated. She never looked back.

I followed after her, to avoid getting lost in the remains of this huge castle. The first dead thing that wasn't dead stopped her for a few minutes. It was set into the wall at the height of her shoulder — a plate of black stone, smooth, with two faint lines of text burned into it. I noticed its shape way before I even considered looking at the words. It was the same type of panel as the one in the village hall. The only difference was that unlike the village hall's, this one was in Hadran. I could read it.

LAST ONLINE: 10C 02 197580. [OFFLINE]. Ella stood very still in front of it for long enough that I read it three times.

"I don't understand the numbers," I said.

"A date," she said.

"Old counting."

"And that date is—""The day it stopped." As she pronounced these words she resumed walking towards her goal. I stayed a moment longer, reading the OFFLINE stretch across the second line. The corridor turned, and the castle forgot it was a building. The right-hand wall had fallen away somewhere in the last however-many years this place had been abandoned, and what was left was a row of broken windows looking out over the city — arches full of light and, in three of them, arches full of sand.

The sand had climbed the sills and spilled inside and lay against the inner wall in the shape of a slope that had given up climbing further. I stopped at the last intact window and looked at the view. Ella didn't. She was already at the far end of the corridor, looking at the light coming down through the broken ceiling — dusty gold, the honey-colored end of the afternoon. She wasn't looking at the castle. She was looking at where she was going inside it. I caught up with her.

She had stopped where the floor sloped down — a broad stair, half-buried, descending into the keep's foundations. At the bottom the dust gave way to bare stone. It wasn't just any stone, the floor was basically a giant monster core, one giant block of blue stone and stone had been worked. A circle covered the whole chamber floor. Not like the ones from the grimoire — those fit in a notebook.

This one was massive and mindbogglingly complex, channels within channels, rings nested inside rings, an entire language of it. Whatever this circle was supposed to do, it was currently broken. That was plain even to me. Entire sections of the circle had been filled with dust. Two hairline cracks ran through the outer ring like scars. But the bigger issue was that the sockets set at the circle's anchor points held nothing but dust — fist-sized hollows where cores should have been, twelve of them, every one empty.

Ella walked out onto it. Crouched. Brushed the dust from a channel with the side of her hand, and followed the groove with her eyes the way I'd follow a sentence.

"What is this circle? Can it be fixed? Is this circle the reason why you led us here?" She didn't answer that. She just started fixing it. She worked around the ring on her knees, and where her fingertips passed, the circle was shining. The dust poured off the cuts inside of the stone floor. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. Line after line the old design came back. It took her over an hour. Finally, from inside her backpack she took out cores.

One by one, she engraved circles in them then she pressed them into the empty sockets. Each one seated with a soft click and woke with a dim blue glow, and by the ninth core the whole circle was faintly luminous, and I realized I was standing in the middle of it and stepped off quickly. She set the last one. Stood in the center. Closed her eyes. The circle lit like the two suns coming up. The light slowly settled for a moment, nothing happened. Then the ground started to shake.

The dust leapt off the floor and hung there. And the city began to put itself back together. Through the broken doorway at the top of the stair I watched it happen in the corridor beyond: stones rising out of the drifts like fish rising to feed, unhurried, each one turning in the air until it remembered its shape, then floating off down the corridor to wherever it had fallen from. A half-collapsed arch knitted itself shut overhead, block by block, the way ice closes over a pond.

Somewhere far off, then nearer, then everywhere — a soft, continuous thunder of masonry repairing itself around us. Ella stood in the light of the circle, looking at the ceiling as though she could see all of it through the stone. She looked at me. One glance — measuring, the way she measured everything, distance and effort and whether I'd keep up. Then she ran.

She took the stair four steps at a time and hit the corridor at full sprint, the royal dress hiked in one fist, and I went after her with no plan past don't lose her in the castle. The corridors were bright now — light spheres waking in their sockets after millennia of dark, blooping on one by one as we passed beneath them, so that we ran in our own moving pool of daylight. And the castle was flying. Blocks the size of coffins slid through the air over our heads, going somewhere.

A lintel rose past a doorway like an elevator. Gravel streamed upward off the floor in rivulets, climbing newly-set walls to pack the joints between stones. A section of ceiling wept dust, then peeled, then re-laid itself beam by beam while we ran under it, and I did not look up, because watching it meant not watching her. A block broke loose from a forming arch directly above her — a chunk of worked stone the size of my two fists.

It dropped from twice her height and struck her full on the head, hard enough that I heard it. She didn't stagger. She didn't slow. The stone cracked against her skull and fell away in pieces and she ran through its shards like weather, and I understood — later, sitting with it — that with the density of mana she carried compressed into her body, a falling rock was roughly as dangerous to her as a cherry blossom. I understood it later.

At the time I mostly understood that I was going to lose her, because she was pulling away. I put my head down to close the gap, and that was when the floor between us stood up. Not all of it — a fifty centimeters patch of the rubble behind her heels, where the half-buried debris had room to move. Blocks rolled together off the flagstones with a heavy knocking sound, jointing into legs, a torso, arms. Crystal flecks surfaced last, set where eyes should be, and lit amber.

It assembled itself from the city's own wreckage in the time it took me to take two strides toward it. A golem. It went to work immediately, on the rubble at its feet. Its arm swept through the debris— —and everything its broom touched flew away. Not pushed. Not shoveled. The rubble simply left the floor and went, sailing off down the corridor in a low arc toward whatever gap it belonged to. A second sweep cleared a meter-wide crescent of bare stone. A third cleared another.

The thing was sweeping the castle clean one armload at a time, and the castle was accepting each delivery like it had been waiting for the mail. I stopped. Just for one breath — two — because my whole brain had snagged on it. Two breaths was all I gave it. Watching was costing me ground, and some part of me — I couldn't have told you why — was certain I shouldn't let the corridor finish its work without me in it. That the door at the end of this was a door I needed to be inside when she reached it. I ran.

The final corridor straightened. The ceiling here had held, or had just finished holding, and the dust lay undisturbed the last ten steps — even the repairs hadn't reached in here yet. Then the walls fell away on both sides and the roof went up and up, and I came through into the last room. Ella was already at the dais. She'd stopped running the way you stop at a graveside — the last few steps taken at a walk, fast-forwarding into stillness. She didn't look back at me.

She looked at the drift heaped against the dais steps — a dune of grey shaped almost like a seat, almost like a joke the wind had spent millennia telling. She reached into it with her bare hand, and swept. The dust fell away in a band. Under it: gold. Tarnished to the color of old breath, but gold — the molding of an armrest, the joint of a leg, the curve of a back taller than my chest. The throne hadn't been taken. It hadn't been destroyed.

It had been forgotten in place, and the years had simply continued over it the way water continues over a stone. She swept the dust from the seat itself — two strokes with the side of her hand, economical, the sleeve of her dress dragging through the drift — and by the time I came up alongside her, she was gathering her skirt and lowering herself onto it. And I stopped walking, because I had a feeling that this moment was a moment that I was not allowed to interrupt. She sat on her throne. The hall was very quiet.

Behind us, muffled by ten paces of untouched dust, the castle kept putting itself back together, and it didn't matter, because she was here, sitting in her chair, and the chair was under her at last. Set into the throne's arm, exactly where a seated hand would rest, was a small panel of black stone. Dark. Dark like everything else here. Ella laid her hand flat on the arm — not on the panel. On the gold beside it.

She sat that way for a moment, a woman in a dusty dress with her hair half-fallen, one hand on the arm of her chair, and I will not describe her face because some of it wasn't mine to keep. The panel woke up when it felt the queen's hand. Symbols surfaced in the black stone the way stars surface at dusk. She read the screen first. Then, she turned it toward me. DATE: 5N 11 200311 OF THE IMPERIAL CALENDAR.

"Two hundred thousand years." Her voice didn't break on it. That's what was worst. She read the date the way she'd read everything in that city — evenly, all the way to the end, like a sentence she refused to flinch from. The date just kept being there when the sentence was over.

"It's—" I started, and had nothing.

"The first count reached a hundred thousand I thought it was just the system failing. But—""Ella—" We kept interrupting each other.

"I checked the terminal in the village," she said. Not to me. To the screen.

"Weeks ago. I told myself the counting had changed. Some new fashion of the nobles." Her hand had not left the throne's arm. The knuckles had gone the color of the dust.

"And, when I checked the first panel earlier. I told myself the same." She looked at me from the throne — sitting straight, both hands on the arms now, the way she'd sat on it for audiences about a quarter-million years ago. I'd seen her eyes wet exactly twice before — once crying in the car, once in front of a movie — and both times she'd hidden it the way you'd hide a wound in a fight. She wasn't hiding it now. She wasn't doing anything now.

She sat in her forgotten chair looking at me, and the tears simply ran down her face, and she did not move to stop them, because there was no one left in the world to be queen at.

"It's all gone," she said. There wasn't anything I could say. So I stepped up onto the dais, sat down on the second step beside her chair, and put my arm around her shoulders.

She went rigid for a moment and then, all at once, she wasn't rigid, and she leaned sideways out of her throne and into me, and her forehead came down against my shoulder, and her hands closed in the back of my shirt, and the queen of the floating island cried into my coat while, three corridors behind us, her city quietly reassembled itself, stone by stone, around its occupied chair.