The Hollow Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

a blade, and the complete and utter lack of a soul—were insufficient.
    Avenge me.
    Suddenly, as a chill night wind swept under the bush, dropping thorns on his face, Dranth woke and sat up carefully, shivering.
    Returning to Talquist, having failed, was one of the riskier things he had ever undertaken.
    But at least he felt he had the winning card in his pocket not only to survive, but to gain another chance at killing the Bolg king, the man who had taken Esten from him.
    And, more specifically, the giant Sergeant-Major who had done the actual killing.
    He passed a thin hand over the hollows of his bald head at the memory of the voice of the woman in the meadow where the assassination attempt had gone wrong, the woman who had been the target of the initial paralytic.
    Whom they had planned to take, along with her infant child, to the emperor of Sorbold, after killing the men they sought.
    Meridion, shhhh, now. Shhhh.
    Meridion.
    He had the name.
    The name Talquist craved above all other pieces of information.
    Dranth reached over and shook the snoring Yabrith awake.
    â€œGet up. We are almost there.”
    â€œIt’s not dawn yet,” Yabrith muttered, yawning widely and farting loudly.
    â€œAll the better,” Dranth said, slinging his pack to his shoulder. “A few more hours of darkness will serve to get us all that much further to Jierna Tal. Let’s go.”

 
    6

    BENEATH THE WAVES OF THE WIDE CENTRAL SEA
    Ashe could feel the sun on his face long before he deigned to open his eyes to it.
    The water around him was lightening to a hazy green as morning came to the world above, a world with no boundaries or landmarks, nothing to break the endlessness of the sea.
    He had been traveling for less than a sennight. This was the fifth sunrise he had experienced since leaving the dry world; it was now bringing the watery realm to wakefulness again. A nominal amount of sleep was still necessary to sustain his consciousness, but it was only enough to rest his mind a little, and did not interfere with his progress into the depths.
    The first two days had been a disturbing confirmation of everything he knew from scouting reports on the coastline blockade. The waters north of Avonderre Harbor where he had waded into the sea were clogged with debris and bits of broken ships, caught in the current and floating in the waves, even now, weeks after the assault and raid from the air that had destroyed one of the greatest and busiest ports in the Known World. Talquist’s forces had managed to eradicate in a relatively few hours what had taken centuries to build.
    The sunlit realm of the first hundred or so fathoms of depth, the part of the sea in which vision was still useful, was full of fish this morning. He had passed through them in his sleep; now, awake and conscious as he had become with the morning light, he was aware of the song of a large cetacean, a whale in all likelihood, somewhere nearby. Ashe knew his wakefulness had made him more corporeal than he was in his sleep, and he hovered in the drift, waiting for it to pass, along with the swirling schools of its prey.
    As the huge creature’s wake rumbled through him, he thought back to the time less than a year before when he had met his most illustrious ancestor not very far from this place in the sea, back on the same cliffs that towered above where he had entered the water.
    In his search for Rhapsody when she had been captured by the demon known as Michael, the Wind of Death, he had come upon MacQuieth Monodiere Nagall, his mother’s ancient forebear and hero of the Seren War two thousand years before. In the sight of history and the whole of the world, MacQuieth was believed long dead, but Ashe had learned some time before that reports of the deaths of ancient Cymrians were occasionally overrated. And while he had witnessed the hero’s actual demise, had been told that his heartbeat, which Achmed the Snake, a man who could track such