Chapter 4

Miles above the repeatedly dazed Innova, miles across the narrow straits that separated Sancrist from Ergoth, a council was convened aboard a calmed ship.

Anchored off the southern coast of Enstar and Nostar, their dark sails taken in against yet another approaching storm, six ships awaited the rising winds and the will of their commander. Cormorant and Shrike. Kestrel and Condor and Petrel.

Aboard the flagship, Peregrine, bristling with guards and warding spells—the Knights of Takhisis pondered the next prize for their invading armies.

It was an unusual group assembled on these ships—an army composed almost entirely of Knights of the Lily, with only a scattering of Thorn Knights and a solitary Knight of the Skull thrown in so that all the orders would be represented.

The Commander had chosen his troops in accordance with divine Vision. And no voice had been raised against Commander Halion Khargos.

No voice, that is, until this hour.

"I know Lord Ariakan has set you at the helm of this venture, Commander Khargos," Subcommander Stormont conceded, pounding the table for emphasis, rattling flagons and bowls and candlesticks in his urgency," but by the gods, there is such a thing as overextending your forces, leaving supply lines and reserve troops vulnerable to whatever desperate resistance a conquered people might devise."

The younger man's steel-gray eyes betrayed no emotion. As the other Knights leaned forward to hear his response, young Halion Khargos seemed almost supernaturally at ease, slowly swirling the wine in his cup, staring into the red eddy as though he were reading auguries in the drink.

"It has happened before," Stormont cautioned. "I remember back in the War of the Lance, when—"

"Textbook strategies," Khargos interrupted. "With textbook examples from a war you helped lose, if I recall."

Stormont's face was scarlet now. Only the restraining hand of Subcommander Hanna kept the old Knight from rising and challenging this precocious upstart. For Halion Khargos's sword was as sharp as his tongue, and in the ranks of the Dread Queen's Knights, there were few who would choose to challenge him.

"But it's history, sir!" Subcommander Hanna protested plaintively, brushing a strand of gray hair from her eyes. "And it is said that 'those who heed not the lessons of history—' "

" 'Are doomed to a thousand lectures.' " Khargos's laugh was dry, intelligent. "Let my Subcommanders trade war stories. I shall set my thoughts to the future."

"Do not neglect the present, Commander Khargos," advised Subcommander Fleetwood, the cagiest of Khargos's subordinates. "While you set your sights toward the future, there is unrest among the brutes and uneasiness among the warriors."

Halion Khargos sighed. Always the brutes—the barbarian shock troops of the Dark Knights. More than half savage, they were brave in battle but a bother during the waiting times.

" 'Tis a consequence we learn to deal with," Khargos maintained. "We're on ship for months, and chaos is the mother of oceans."

"I am afraid that your theology is mistaken, Commander," the cleric Oliver, the solitary Skull Knight, observed slyly. "Zeboim is the mother of oceans. Lord Ariakan would frown at your… oversight."

"Figures of speech are not theology, Oliver," Khargos replied. "I was merely metaphorical, offering no dogma. Your confusion on this matter may become more than spiritually dangerous."

Subcommander Fleetwood glanced apprehensively at his fellow officers. Halion Khargos was a mystic of some note, famous for revelations carried from the Goddess herself. Though the Vision was available to each and every Knight, Halion Khargos's dark communion was noted for its intensity and depth and frequency.

Some said it had made him half mad, others that it had made him prophetic. All agreed that in some incomprehensible way the Goddess had anointed him and that Halion Khargos, scarcely eighteen years old, was already one of the most dangerous Knights in her legions.

The cleric and the subcommanders fell silent. Wisdom was, after all, a fruit of their age and training.

And it was wise not to cross the Commander.

The rise of Halion Khargos was unusual only in its swiftness.

Of obscure origins somewhere in the western islands, a country that had for the most part escaped the worst ravages of the War of the Lance, he was said to be the son of a minor noblewoman, landless and poor, his father uncertain.

Other stories were less flattering: He was the son of a stone mason, or the youngest child of a hardworking family of peasants whom he had neglected and then forgotten in his breathless rise to power. In the old days of the dragonarmies there would have been other rumors, for the older Knights could scarcely have imagined such ascent without friends in the highest places, or blackmail or bribery.

No matter the talents of Halion Khargos—and there were many—he carried an excess of mystery. Those above him and those below him were uncomfortable in his presence, and only the most uninformed petitioners and supplicants trusted him entirely.

He had received the Call at thirteen, under circumstances unknown. Nobody knew his advocate—the Knight who had sponsored him through his training and tests—and it seemed to many that someone would have come forward to claim a prize student, to announce that this prodigy is mine, this wonder I have sponsored. But the Lords and the great commanders had been silent, and this silence had given rise to wilder speculation.

That Khargos's advocate was Lord Ariakan himself. That the great man was preparing the lad for a position high in the Order, perhaps as his eventual successor.

But influence and favor, no matter how powerful, stop at the Test of Takhisis, where it is written that the Goddess decides the worth of each Novice. It was said of Halion Khargos that whatever ordeal he had undertaken in the sight of the Dark Queen, he had passed through it without visible torment.

The older Knights took stock of their own experience, remembered the gaunt return from wastelands or tunnels or the unmanning country of their own nightmares. None of them had escaped unscarred, unscathed.

This one, this Halion Khargos, had passed through the test at fifteen, emerging as serene and boyish as he was when chosen for the Order. Something about him had sobered, yes; he had put away games and most outward signs of childishness. He kept to himself more than others.

And unlike any other Knight they knew, he continued to commune in the dark threads of the Vision the Dread Queen grants her servants.

He was Groupcommander in the Order of the Lily by the green age of seventeen. Now men older and more experienced than himself were expected to march at his order and die at his command.

This was the boy before whom they spread the western maps as a hard rain began to wash the decks of Peregrine, as the lesser Knights sought shelter in the crowded, humid barracks and the sentinels in the crow's nest wrapped their cloaks more tightly against the rising wind.

"We'll sail west, then," the Commander decreed softly, his eyes fixed on nothing but the faint light of the solitary lantern. "That much is in my bones and instincts. But the particular destination is cloudy at the moment. I shall consult Herself. She reveals all things. If all goes well, by morning we shall have an answer. Go to your quarters now. Go to your ships."

To these soft words and to their certainty, even the veterans deferred without question. Whatever the mysteries surrounding Commander Khargos, his path to the Vision was short and direct.

What Takhisis taught him was uncanny. Aided by the Vision, he knew at once the weakness in a line of enemy troops, the flaws in the most formidable fortifications. In the past month two fortresses had fallen to him, each on a single day, the casualties among his troops so few as to be negligible.

Indeed, there were a few among the Gray Knights who harbored the blasphemous thought that Takhisis had met her match in this boy, that their dark communion was almost a meeting of equals.

Most of the Knights would have scoffed at such a thought. But there was a surety about the Commander, a shrewdness and insight that could not have come from his years—not so much wisdom as a kind of prophetic instinct.

Which was why when ordered to their quarters, two of the three subcommanders, who might have questioned the tactics of a lesser mind, bowed dutifully before the lad and took their leave, along with the Thorn Knights who had been called to this council that was really no council at all.

The Bone Acolyte Oliver, alone in his skepticism, turned at the cabin door and looked back into the dimly lit room.

In a haze above the lantern he thought he saw the face of a woman, intent and savagely beautiful.

Like a lovely poison, Oliver thought. Like the breath of the Death Lily.

She had spoken to him once, as she had to all the Knights. During the long ordeal of the Test. On occasion—occasions such as this—Oliver thought he glimpsed her, but his senses were confused by memory and desire.

And knowing he stood on the threshold of something intimate, vaguely embarrassed like a clumsy intruder, he closed the door behind him and stepped out into the night and rain.

Khargos had learned to love the presence of the Goddess. He had come to her readily and eagerly, even before the Call. Before the arrival of his Advocate…

…he had waited for Takhisis, in bleak abandoned places far from the eyes of his puzzled guardians. On black coasts he had found her seated on rocks that spelled the death of sailors. In storm clouds her face had appeared to him.

Once also in a dungeon, and once atop a ruined tower.

Most often she came to him in a trance or a dream. Sometimes he thought he could remember the first time, a soothing narcotic voice from the shadowed corner of a nursery he could not quite recall.

She had always been with him, he supposed.

So his Call to the Order had been no surprise, but part of a thing so daily and accustomed that it was like food or sleeping. Like a drug, perhaps, because he longed for it past yearning, drew nourishment from her face and her voice.

Like a drug, but without the wasting away, he told himself, as now, once again, he met her, in the dark fire at the heart of the lantern glow, a darkness that expanded with the light until the walls of the storm-tossed cabin were twilit gray, and he breathed in a fragrance and a freedom he could not find in his waking life.

By all the assembled gods, and the chaos that fathered them all, he loved Her, and her night-struck seductions opened his waiting veins.

How is my love, my dear, my darling? asked the gray light at the heart of the fire.

Khargos sat silent, knowing from long communion that he was not supposed to answer, that something in the depth of that gray light cared not how he fared. Strangely, it was that indifference that he loved most of all.

He would wait. She would tell him how he was. Soon he would know what to answer.

Then he would know what to ask.

Stormont is a fool, the Queen observed. But you know that.

He sank into abiding stillness, and the walls of the cabin vanished. A cold rain bathed him, doused the light of the lantern.

He was inside the Goddess. He was home.

"Overextension of troop and supply line"? she asked mockingly. " Strategic blunder"?

You answered him well, my darling. And that night-grown mushroom Oliver, with his prattle of theology, you answered them both well, though perhaps too kindly, as is your sweet nature.

Let them stand in the storm. Make prayers to Our tortoise-shelled Sister for safe voyage and full sail. It is a courtesy I permit.

He felt a rush of blood course up the back of his neck The hairs on his nape stood rigid and hot. Halion Khargos gasped, and his eyesight blurred.

Now She stood before him, Her dark and diaphanous robes open and inviting.

I have a plan for Stormont, she soothed. He will not question you for long. Pay him no further attention. This is no time for diversion.

For we are bound, you and I, toward a place where my darkness has failed before.

Will not fail again.

For I have found my one true Acolyte.

Invisible lips touched his own, traced a dry circle on his throat. The commander shivered in ecstasy, closed his eyes…

A sea stretched before him, black and calm and glossy as polished stone. Reeling, he bit his lip, tasted blood.

Now, at the edge of his visionary sight, an island came into view. A mountainous island capped by a smoldering volcano, the sky above it creased with lightning and the muted fires of sunset.

"Sancrist," Khargos murmured.

He knew the place at once. Remembered it, out of smoke and light.

And like an echo, like water coursing over his breast, pooling on his lap and thighs, a voice fragmented, only remotely feminine now, echoed his thoughts and words.

Sancrist. Sancrist it is, then.

With a shudder, Halion Khargos opened his eyes to the cabin room, to the table and lantern.

The rain hammered outside on the storm-lashed deck. His hand rested on the map still spread before him. Water dripped from his fingers onto the blurred silhouettes of the western islands. Dark ink smeared over the outline of Mount Nevermind.