The Dark Queen Read Free Page B

     where light had fled entirely seemed hazy, almost pale compared to the kind of darkness
     that surrounded thema 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, drifting 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 continual 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 thermal, 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 armiesthe irresistible armiesat 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 noweluding 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 stirring 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 moonsthe
     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