The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [80]
These suddenly seemed to be very important questions, because it seemed to Stephen that the world had to have been around for a long time for water to dig channels through stone, abandon them, dig new ones, and so on. The saints certainly could have made caverns when they made dry land, but why make them appear as if they had been formed by natural processes that ought to take many thousands of years? They could do so, of course, but why?
And if there were no saints, if the power was just something that was, how long had it been here? Where had it come from?
How many times since the beginning of the world had someone—or something—walked this faneway, and what had happened?
The thought literally arrested him. So far as he knew, only Virgenya Dare and Kauron had walked this path. Virgenya Dare used the power to conquer and eradicate the Skasloi. Kauron didn’t seem to have survived to use his power. If he had, he surely would have stopped the rise of the Damned Saints, the Warlock Wars, and the unholy reign of the Black Jester.
Virgenya Dare had saved the Mannish and Sefry races from slavery. Kauron had died and failed to prevent what was in many ways a rebirth of the Skasloi evil. Now it seemed chaos and night were coming again, and it was his task to walk the fanes, wield the power, and set things right.
Could it really be that simple? Was he really the one? Would he succeed—or fail as Kauron had?
He shook his head. Why hadn’t the Skasloi walked the fanes? They must have known about them. How could they not?
“Because the saints love us,” Stephen said aloud. “They love what is right and good.”
But that sounded so silly that he suddenly knew for certain that he didn’t believe it anymore.
The next fane was a pool of very cold water. He approached it without hesitation and thrust his hands in, and in an instant he heard a voice. The language was a very ancient form of Thiuda, but before he could cipher it out, it was joined suddenly by ten more voices, then fifty, a thousand, a hundred thousand. He felt his jaw working and then didn’t feel much at all as his mind shouted to be heard, to stay different, to not be swept away in the ocean of weeping, pleading, screaming, cajoling. Now it was all one sound, a single voice saying everything and thus nothing, thinning, rising in pitch, gone.
He blinked and yanked his hands from the pool, but he knew it was too late because he could still hear that final tone, itching far in the back of his mind, waiting.
Waiting to swallow him.
And even as he tried to force the voices out, they were starting to emerge again, not from the pool this time but from his own head. And he knew that when they did come back, his mind would be swept away.
All fanes have a limit. All fanes have a demand. They take and they give. If I don’t finish this in time, the voices will make me one of them. My body will starve. I’ll never see Aspar or Winna or Zemlé again.
He pushed himself up, trying to keep his panic down as the susurrus slowly waxed.
I finish, then. I finish.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ZO BUSO BRATO
THE GUARDS took Cazio down several halls and through the kitchens, where red-faced women in tan aprons and white head scarves labored about a hearth big enough to walk into without ducking. He wondered briefly if they meant to cook him or at least threaten to, but they pushed him on through the kitchen just as the scent of boiled beef and green vinegar sauce began to waken him to how very hungry he was.
He glanced at a large knife on a cutting table, still red from butchering. If he could get his hands on that—
The guard behind him jabbed him with his sword.
“No,” he said. “Don’t think about it. They want you alive, but they didn’t say anything about hamstringing you.”
Cazio half turned. “There are six of you, and you’re still scared of me. Come on. Let me have the knife and you can keep your swords. I’ll show the ladies what a man really is. If they ever knew, you fellows have made them forget, I’m sure.”
He raised his voice a bit more. “What about it, ladies? Would