The Dark Queen by Michael Williams

from the Outer Tower toward the
     Sacred Chamber, the underground sanctuary in which the Kingpriest and the principal
     clerics of Istar greeted every new day with First Prayer. The torches that lined the
     stairwell and the corridors smoked and sputtered, and among the clergy were many who
     nodded or shuffled sleepily, wrested from hard sleep and comfortable beds by ritual
     demand. At other places in the temple and in the city, more clergy gathered in similar
     ceremony, but those in the Sacred Chamber were the chosen, the elite whose service to
     Istar had spanned years, decades in some cases, even the reigns of several Kingpriests. At
     an hour more daylit or in a place less secure, the guards might have counted the white
     robes that
    entered the chamber that morning. Had they done so, they would have found that four of the
     number were missing, and that the infirmaries of the temple accounted for only three of
     the absent clergy. But the hour was early, the guards as drowsy as the celebrants. The
     bronze-armored sentries nodded and blinked and closed the doors to the chamber at the
     appointed time, never knowing that one whose presence was expectedthe cleric Vaananen of
     Near Qualinestihad chosen not to attend the morning's ceremonies. Instead, Brother
     Vaananen remained in his meditation chamber, stirring the fine white sand in his rena
     garden. Vaananen was a westerner, and therefore seemed quite austere to some of the others
     in the brother- hoodmainly the Istarians who were spoiled by the city's soft ways and easy
     living. He was a tall, spare man, with long black-and-silver hair, which he kept clubbed
     neatly at his neck. His eyes were moss green and seemed to fill his entire face. Vaananen
     smiled frequently, but always in secret, under his ample hood. He was a disguised druid
     working among the clerics, a man whose solitary pursuits made for few friends. All the
     better. His druidic masters had set him in Istar with the purpose of salvaging any ancient
     texts from the Kingpriest's destructive edicts. Secretly, painstakingly, Vaananen copied
     what he could find, translating from rune and glyph into the common alphabet, and
     smuggling the new-made books out by silent courier and under other covers and titles. Of
     late, he had found new things to do as well. Vaananen's chamber was sparely and
     beautifully appointed: a small carved cot, a handmade teak table and copy desk, an
     exquisite stained glass lamp, and the rena gardena simple, ten-foot-square recession in
     the floor, filled with sharp-grained white sand and punctuated with cacti and three large
     but movable stones, each of which represented one of the moons. The secret of the garden
     was an old sylvan magic, perfected among the elves who, in the Age of Dreams, brought the
     sand into the forest to build the first of the renas. These elves had also known the true
     meaning of the stones: that the black stone was augury, foretelling with the fractured,
     fitful light of divination, while the red stone told the past, its vision warped by the
     many versions of history. The white stone showed the present, showed what was happening
     someplace, usually unknown, a hundred feet or a thousand miles from the reader. Moving
     slowly, carefully over the bright sand, Vaananen stirred circles with one foot. He bent,
     hoisted the red stone, and set it beside the white. Then, seating himself on the black
     stone, he stared across the broken expanse of sand, reading the fresh geometry of dune and
     ripple, the violet shadows cast by the stones. The rena garden was now only a relaxation
     tool among the human clergy of Qualinesti. Absorbed and tamed into the Istarian theocracy,
     it was little more than a sedative, its true ancient powers forgotten. Now the sand and
     the abstract positioning of the stones were supposed to calm the mind for contemplation,
     create a serenity in much the same way as, say,