Chaos Queen--Fear the Stars (Chaos Queen 4) Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Christopher Husberg

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I The Chaos Queen

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Part II The Agony of Belief

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  Interlude A Tale of Ten Monarchs

  Part III Unredeemable Time

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Part IV Who we Take with US

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Also by Christopher Husberg

  Duskfall

  Dark Immolation

  Blood Requiem

  Fear the Stars

  THE CHAOS QUEEN QUINTET

  CHRISTOPHER HUSBERG

  TITAN BOOKS

  Fear the Stars

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783299218

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783299225

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: June 2019

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  © 2019 Christopher Husberg. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  For Mom

  PART I

  THE CHAOS QUEEN

  1

  173rd Year of the People’s Age, Tiellan City of Adimora,

  BLOOD SOAKED THROUGH THE side of Winter’s black leather leggings as she rode at the head of a long column of horse toward the hidden city of Adimora. The tiellan riders, though smaller in stature than most humans and of finer features, nevertheless looked formidable in worn battle gear and tight formation. As well they should; they rode to Adimora after another victory.

  The blood on Winter’s leggings was not hers, but that of the commander of the Khalic force she and her Rangers had just decimated. The sack that contained his head knocked against her leg again; she had given up trying to adjust it. If the cursed thing wanted to bleed on her, let it. It seemed a small enough revenge.

  “Urstadt, has word been sent to alert the city to our arrival?” Winter asked the human who rode beside her—the only human in her otherwise tiellan Ranger force.

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Urstadt said. “They are expecting us.”

  Winter nodded. The force that rode behind her—over five hundred of her best fighters—would have taken hours to meander down the gorge through the main entrance to the underground city. Their chosen route led to a wider and less imposing entryway—horses could traverse it easily. Like all routes in to the city, it was well hidden, and led to a subterranean passage that would bring them into the city itself.

  “Are they aware of our victory?” Winter asked.

  “They are, Your Majesty.”

  Winter’s lips pursed as she glanced at Urstadt. She still couldn’t get used to the appellation on her companion’s lips, but she had conceded that anything more familiar would imply weakness. And in the delicately balanced situation, she couldn’t afford a challenge to her leadership from within her ranks.

  “Some victory it was,” Winter muttered. The head in the sack, bleeding vengefully on her leg, was for show. The soldiers they had destroyed had been hardly more than a guard force for a merchant caravan. But Grand Marshal Carrieri of the Khalic Legion had all but pulled his major forces back to the city of Triah, and victories were hard to come by. Her own Rangers had not begun the year as warlike people—they were for the most part refugees from the city of Cineste who hadn’t even seen a weapon until they had been forced to flee. But the clanspeople of the plains encircling Adimora were a different matter; they lived and died by the sword. Once the clans had joined their numbers to her own, their respect for the honor of the battlefield had infected the Rangers, and Winter herself. And after the devastating losses Winter’s army had faced at Carrieri’s hand, and then in the battle with the Daemon Mefiston’s army of shadowy Outsiders three months ago, Winter needed to give her people victories. For now, this was the best she could do. A head that refused to stop bleeding.

  The air chilled, despite the sun beating down on her. On the journey home, the leaves had turned from green to red and orange. Ahead of her, a series of hills rose above the valley of the River Setso, like waves frozen in place. This was the easiest path for the horses to follow, but even here large outcroppings and boulders lined the water. Looking back, Winter was pleased to see Selldor, her lieutenant, had already lit his torch. Using the light it cast, she spurred her horse closer to the narrowing river’s edge, following it until it bent between two hills. Once the river had been wider, cutting a gorge into the hillside, now artfully hidden by overhanging trees. Behind her, she saw more torches being lit as the company followed her into the ravine, descending gradually until the sky disappeared.

  The path to the city twisted and turned, with many false trails to waylay travelers. They soon emerged into a large cave, where a pair of armed guards awaited them. Other Rangers were placed at strategic points on the plains above, keeping a watchful eye on the area surrounding this entrance. These two, a man and a woman, knelt when they saw Winter.

  “Welcome home, Your Majesty,” the woman said.

  Home. Adimora was not her home, no more than the Rodenese city of Izet had been when she had been an unwilling guest there, and no more than her hometown of Pranna was now that the tiellan population had fled the prejudice and dangerous arrogance of their former human neighbors. “Home” had little meaning for her these days. Especially when, at the heart of Adimora, a Daemon was lurking.

  * * *

  Leaving her commanders to see to the disbanding of the company, and gladly relinquishing the bloody head to Urstadt’s care, Winter wound her way on foot through the busy city, dodging the attention of her fellow warriors,
Rangers and clanspeople both. Whereas on the surface Adimora was silent and sparsely populated, below ground it teemed with life, lit by torches and natural lightwells. The thousand or so tiellans who called Adimora home had carved their homes out of the underground rock. Now that the day was drawing to a close, traders were packing away their goods, calling out to passers-by in the hope of one last sale. Children darted past her in a complicated game. She refused to wear a crown or change her wardrobe, and her lean, powerfully built frame looked like any Ranger’s. If anyone noticed Winter, she was just another returning soldier—without her army, nobody recognized her.

  The rock dwellings were mostly small, tightly packed affairs, and the one she sought was no exception. But neither the tiellan inhabitant nor the Daemon he allowed to share his body was of this city.

  Ghian answered his door with a smile, as if there were no enmity between them, and nodded her toward a seat at the small table at the center of the room. As the leader of the Druids of Cineste, he had been one of the few newcomers to procure a place below ground; the rest of the refugees Winter had brought from Cineste, Druids and Rangers alike, camped above ground, either in the meager huts that made up Adimora’s above-ground facade, or in tents surrounding them. Ghian had retreated from his old companions since Winter had been declared queen. Many would have put this down to thwarted ambition; Winter knew better. Inside Ghian another presence lived: the Daemon Azael, the Fear Lord.

  “What news do you have for me, Ghian?” Winter asked.

  “News? I’m afraid there is not much to speak of. The Cracked Spear—”

  Winter waved a hand. “Their missives have followed me into battle and back out again. I don’t need to hear any more about the Cracked Spear and their trade arrangements.” The Cracked Spear had led the tiellan clans until Winter wrested power from them. They liked to pretend they still had a say, but Winter did not care for pretense. “Tell me about you, Ghian. About Azael.”

  Ghian shrugged. “Even if I knew…”

  “You wouldn’t tell me,” Winter finished for him. “You do this every time. You insist on your inability to communicate with me, until suddenly you speak up. Can we just skip to that part this time? I’ve had a long day, and I still have blood on my clothes. I’d like to get cleaned up.”

  “Blood on your clothes.” Ghian’s eyes rested on Winter thoughtfully. Something in Ghian’s demeanor shifted. An image flashed in Winter’s mind.

  A black skull, wreathed in black flame.

  “You cannot escape blood,” Ghian said, with the skull’s dead smile.

  Fear closed in on her, but she pushed it away. Burning skull or not, she had a duty to her people.

  “Why are you here, with us? Why did you choose Ghian?”

  “Because you refused me.” Something about his voice had changed, or his choice of words; Winter was now speaking with Azael, the Fear Lord, who called himself the master of the Nine Daemons. “And I want to keep an eye on you. I thought you would understand that by now. The Fear Lord, and the Chaos Queen,” he added, chuckling. “What a pair we make.”

  “The Khalic Legion may call me by that name in their ignorance,” Winter retorted. “But that title is out of an old tale—it belongs to another, if she ever existed.” Since Carrieri had left her forces to be decimated by Mefiston’s army of Outsiders, Winter’s own combined Ranger and clan force had been reduced to roving the countryside in smaller bands, picking fights with other equally small groups of humans. Sowing chaos and disorder. But she could not afford to meet the might of the Khalic forces in open battle, not with her numbers.

  Her words only made Azael laugh harder.

  “Either way,” she said, meeting Ghian’s eyes and the Daemon beneath them, despite the swelling fear in her throat, “a queen commands a lord.”

  Ghian’s laughter faded. “No one commands Azael,” he said. “Not since—”

  “No one has commanded Azael since what?” Winter asked.

  “I do not have the capacity to speak of it.”

  A shadow passed over Ghian’s face, and for a moment Winter knew she was speaking with the man again, not the Daemon.

  Fear burned in Ghian’s eyes. He still had his ability to choose, she was almost sure of that, but whatever Azael threatened him with was enough to shut Ghian up. Ghian had allowed himself to become Azael’s avatar in the first place because he was scared, frightened for his people. It had been a stupid decision, and Winter hated him for making it, for making this Daemon a part of her life again, but there was a small part of her that understood it.

  “Ghian, you cannot enjoy being connected to this… thing,” Winter said. “You’re invoking terrible danger. Not just to yourself, but to the whole movement you’ve been trying to—”

  “You know nothing of the movement,” Ghian rasped— himself again, it seemed—standing up so quickly he knocked his chair over backwards. “You joined us with no intention of helping. You don’t care about the Druids, you don’t care about the tiellans at all.”

  Winter looked away. After Lian’s death in Roden she had not cared about anything for a long time, not until Eranda was killed in the battle against Mefiston. That loss of one of the last tiellans from her hometown—a woman who had known her from infancy—had changed things for her.

  But how could she express that to Ghian?

  “You were bored, that was all. You had nothing else to do with your life, so you joined us. Your powers helped us at first, but all they’ve done is corrupt the Druid movement. So many have died, human and tiellan, who did not need to die. Those deaths are at your feet, Winter. Those deaths—”

  Ghian cocked his head to the side, as if listening. After a moment, he bent over and picked up the overturned chair. Slowly, he righted it, and sat back down.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “My outburst was uncalled for. What I said… does not matter.”

  You might not think it matters, but it is still true, Winter thought. And another voice whispered in her head.

  Murderer.

  “These little skirmishes you fight, these miniature victories, they are useless. They accomplish nothing.”

  Winter looked hard at Ghian, trying to discern who really spoke now, the man or the Daemon. She could not be sure.

  “They raise morale,” Winter whispered.

  “But they do not inspire fear.”

  The thought had crossed her mind more than once. Carrieri had been winning the battle against her troops when Mefiston and his Outsiders had entered the field. In the heat of the battle, they had briefly fought alongside one another to save themselves from being overcome—but Carrieri had broken the pact and fled the field, leaving her and her people to be slaughtered. The human army did not see the full blossoming of her psimantic strength, when she had accessed the powers of the huge standing stone—a rihnemin—that towered over the battlefield, and slaughtered the Outsiders and Mefiston himself in an attack of liquid fire. Her people knew of her powers; the humans were ignorant of it. And these small skirmishes did not bolster her reputation. The Chaos Queen was a derogatory name. She needed to do more to regain her reputation, to make people fear her again. Only then could she bring about change for the tiellans. They had been enslaved and oppressed, downtrodden for far too long. Winter would assure them a place alongside the humans. She would end the oppression, the fear.

  But she could not end those things here, in Adimora.

  “I must go to Triah,” Winter said softly. “Carrieri is hiding there, like a fox in a hole. I’ll drag him out and make him pay.” And in so doing, show how powerful the tiellans could truly be.

  “Yes,” Ghian hissed. The black skull flashed again. “Go to Triah. That is where all of this will end. Make people notice you again. You need their fear. And for that, you need me.”

  Winter closed her eyes, remembering the words of her friend Galce: The only order is Chaos. It seemed a long time since she had consulted Chaos, as Galce had told her the legendary Chaos Queen had done. As
she closed her eyes, the sphere of Chaos waited patiently in her mind as always. This time, it was black and ominous.

  2

  Triah

  THE GATE TO FAMED TRIAH, the great Circle City, was nowhere near as impressive as Cinzia remembered it. A wave of embarrassment washed over her as she checked her sister’s face. She had told Jane of Triah’s grandeur numerous times, but this gate was no better than the gates they’d grown up with in Navone. Of course, Jane didn’t know that this was just the outer gate, or that there were two grander gates beyond; but, then again, Jane didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the gate, anyway. Instead, her eyes repeatedly looked to the city beyond.

  Farmlands and homes sprawled outward from the wall that encircled the greater city, spilling into the valley along the river toward the cliffs to the north. Cinzia felt the excitement stirring within her at the thought of seeing the city: the Trinacrya, the Crystal Pyramid, the trim tower-houses and apartments, and of course God’s Eye overseeing it all.

  But Triah was no longer her home, she reminded herself. Just as her family had fled Navone, and would likely never return, her life here—the chapel she had once run in the southwestern corner of the city near the harbor and the Cat District, her apartment at the seminary, her friends in the Denomination and in her congregation—was no longer hers. Her former Goddessguard, Kovac, was dead. Everything had changed when she had returned to Navone and discovered her sister had become a heretic, the Prophetess; and soon she had joined in the heresy, had become a disciple in the new Church of Canta, an Odenite.

  Perhaps there was nothing left for her in Triah at all.

  And yet Jane had dictated they come. Cinzia obeyed, dutifully, but her own feelings warred within her the closer she got to the Center Circle. Not only her misgivings about returning to the city itself, but her misgivings about Jane.

  She looked over at Knot, walking beside her. The three of them—Cinzia, Jane, and Knot—had come to the city alone, leaving the other four Disciples behind, for now. “Do you feel anything, being here?” she asked. “Lathe was from Triah. What about your other sifts?”