The Wheel of Osheim (The Red Queen's War 3)

Less than a week . Suddenly the perimeter reports seemed far more important.

“Trouble,” I said. “Some graveyards we hadn’t got to have emptied themselves. Occupants missing. A dozen corpse attacks reported. Two families . . . missing.” I winced. The guard had led me to one house, close to the North Road. Blood on the floor, on the walls, broken furniture. Flies everywhere. No occupants. Except a baby in its crib. Or rather, the remains of one. “The neighbours saw nothing.” That had been hard to imagine with the houses built shoulder to shoulder. I’d set the guard knocking on doors and hurried back to the palace to meet Luntar. Garyus had wanted the privacy of the throne room to conclude our discussion and Luntar had other people to see before he left. He’d mentioned Dr. Taproot as one of those, though I hadn’t heard the circus had come to town. “I need to get back and oversee a series of sweeps.” I turned back to face the throne room, and stopped in momentary surprise.

“I won’t keep you long.” Luntar stood before us, we two his only witnesses. He slipped from the memory of every other person even as they saw him. An invisibility of a kind. Whether there was something in the Kendeth blood that resisted the trick, or whether he simply chose to allow us to remember him, he didn’t say, though even in the minute reporting to the steward with my back to Luntar I had forgotten that he was there.

“If you would all be so kind as to afford my great-nephew and me a little privacy.” Garyus raised his voice to carry. The remnants of his court began to move toward the doors. “Even you, Mary.” This to the most senior of his nurses, a solid matron who seemed to think herself indispensable. “And gentlemen—if you will.” He nodded to the guardsmen flanking him. “All my guards.”

The captain approached, boots heavy on the polished floor. “Steward, it’s our place to protect you.”

“If I die in your absence Prince Jalan is to be demoted to peasant. There, I should be safe enough now?”

The guard captain frowned, the word “but” struggling to get off his lips.

“And really, I insist,” Garyus said.

Five minutes later, after the guard had double-checked each dark corner, we were alone.

“I had hoped to find the Red Queen here,” Luntar said. “Now it seems I must follow her to Slov.”

I resisted the obvious jibe that he should have foreseen this circumstance. No doubt he had interfered with Grandmother’s fate in the past and denied himself further visions of her future. That or the Silent Sister guarded her from such foretelling.

“When must you leave?” The day before he arrived would have suited me. I still found Luntar deeply unsettling, the rawness of his burned flesh demanded a reaction and if it couldn’t get one from him it certainly created something very close to pain in me. The Silent Sister had looked so far into our bright future that it had blinded her in one eye. Luntar had looked beyond even that and been burned head to toe by what he saw. To hear Garyus speak of it, somewhere not too far ahead of us the impossible brilliance of a thousand Builders’ Suns consumed our all our futures.

“I will leave immediately we conclude our discussion here,” Luntar said. “It’s a long walk, and no horse will bear me.”

“Tell me . . .” I glanced at Garyus, but he waved for me to continue. “Tell me, the future that burned you, that you say is coming, is this the end the Red Queen fears? The doom the Builders set upon us when they worked their science and changed the world?” I tried not to make it sound like an accusation—but it was. Luntar and his kind had been cracking reality for generations, driving us to the edge as they pulled more and more magic through the fabric of the world.

Beside me Garyus nodded his heavy head. His gaze rested upon the cube of white plasteek in his lap—the box of ghosts that Luntar had given him.

“There’s nothing we can do?” I asked. Just somewhere safe to run to would be good.

Luntar set both hands to his face and slid them wetly toward his brow as if pushing away some weariness. “In some futures it’s the cracking of the world that ends us, darkness and light, the elements taking on monstrous forms, the very substance of which we are made unravelling . . . In other futures it’s the light of the Builders’ weapons that scorches us from the earth.”

“Shit.” I had seen that light. I tried to take the whine from my voice and sound more like Snorri would. “Twice now in the space of a year Builders’ Suns have lit. I heard of one in Gelleth on my trip north, and then in Liba I saw one with my own eyes, burning the desert. Who’s using these dead men’s weapons against us, and why?”