“Any second now, and the, ah, cows have moved off. Glad they saw us coming,” Avina reported.
The ground didn’t rush up—it approached.
Thump.
“That’s it?” Nolan asked.
“That’s it. We’re down. The capsule will sink a bit. Snow’s about three meters deep here. We might want to pile out,” Cherry said, opening the single door with a savage push of her augmented strength.
The door swung open with a protest, revealing a sky radiant with the defiant gleam of countless stars.
A cold wind blew in, bringing the damp hints of oncoming snow.
“Snow soon,” Avina said. Cherry jumped out, looked around, and held out a hand to Avina, who took it and stepped into the snow. It squeaked under her boots, then Nolan came out, the barrel of his weapon out and up.
They stood, letting the moment settle over them.
“To the city,” Nolan said. “Sindelaar awaits.”
“To the city,” Avina agreed.
Cherry closed the hatch, then patted it with affection. “Thanks for the lift, old girl. Hey, wait—Sindelaar?”
Nolan rubbed at the back of his neck. “Yeah.”
“That’s a guilty face. You know things I don’t, which would mean that,” Cherry said, waggling a finger. “Jack and Diane?”
“Yes. A few reports. We’re not unarmed in terms of information, though we’ve got a big job ahead of us. Shitty odds, too.”
“Who are Jack and Diane?” Avina asked, confusion muddling her features.
“Drones, and it’s a long story,” Cherry said.
“Not really. Two drones are spying on, uh, the entire river population, and have been reporting to me, quietly,” Nolan said.
“You dick. Why didn’t you share this? We could’ve—” Avina started, then trailed off. “Oh. Come here anyway, and tried to save the planet or whatever.”
“Right. I kept it from Cherry, too. We’ve learned a lot, but we still don’t have answers to the big questions. Which is why we’re here,” Nolan said, a bit sheepishly.
“Sorry I called you a dick,” Avina said.
“I deserved it. Shall we?” Nolan waved, and both Cherry and Avina nodded.
Ahead, the night beckoned.
The Tired Queen
South
“Arthun?”
The question was gentle, asked in the purpling gloom of a night where rain would soon fall. Dark clouds obscured the dying sun, bloody smears of light fading on the restless river from shore to shore.
“I am here,” said the tired queen. Her feet hung limp in the current, olive skin blending in the evening water. Every part of Arthun looked weary, even her bright, black eyes, their tilt only adding to an impenetrable sadness that clung to her like morning fog. “Why don’t you join me?” She patted the dock, its timbers bleached by the sun and smoothed by countless feet. At the end of the dock, the Marwai guards brought from the castle slept, too exhausted to stay awake after days of rescue attempts. Even their breathing seemed hopeless, and one coughed a cry in his sleep, part sadness and defeat. They could not escape the tragedy anywhere, not even in the land of dreams.
Brescia leapt out of the water, careful to twist away and not soak the woman who would now be queen over a land she had no interest in. “Lady, are you hurt?”
“Other than my soul? Yes.”
“Have you received treatment? Food?” Brescia looked alarmed. Arthun’s southern skin was thin with grief, but there was something more at work. Brescia smelled blood, subtle but present. Since the queen’s tunic was red, she could see nothing other than the array of stains from the wreck. Arthun hadn’t left the docks in the days since the wedding, and it showed. Her hair was a wild nest of black curls, and there were fresh bruises on her feet. She’d been shoeless the entire time the halfkin had been pulling victims from the water, a far cry from the usual garb she wore in her towering palace of bamboo and silk.
“I think I have eaten. I cannot be sure, but it doesn’t matter, Brescia.” Arthun turned that black gaze onto Brescia, and the air cooled between them. “Where is my husband? Where is my son?”
“We do not know, lady.”
“Are you looking?”
“We are. Creel is, as I have been, and our whole pod. There were—there were many, lady. So very many, and the current is pulling them to the deltas with each passing second. We may never know,” she admitted. It was plausible. The river was huge. A body was a small thing, especially once the soul was gone.
“There are beasts in the depths.”
“There are, but they fear us. Mostly,” Brescia said.
“Where is the barge?” Arthun looked out over the water, its surface now lit by the rising moons. The channel was restless, the edges calm. Deceptively so, but that was how the river had always been. Dangerous in the middle, and filled with lies to the bottom mud, where hidden things could sink for all eternity.
“On a wide shelf, but not too far down. The larger half is wedged against a rock ledge, driven into the muck by the force of its sinking. I do not think it will leave there for some time,” Brescia said.
“So it is stable in your mind?”
“As much as it can be, given the nature of water and the wreck itself. The charred beams will eventually break, and the worms will take their toll yet again.”
Arthun twitched at a memory, then looked back to Brescia. There was life in her eyes, and she took the halfkin’s hand, squeezing with desperate purpose. “Ready a bell and take me there.”
“A bell? Lady, you’re no diver. You’re wounded, you’re tired—it would be suicide,” Brescia said. Her protest was the truth. Divers could use sap covered bladders filled with pumped air, but even that would only give a person five minutes to breathe. Arthun would be dead before she reached the barge, and that would make Brescia a murderer.
It could not be done.
“Then you must go and be my eyes. Find my son. Find my husband, and bring them to me. I beg of you. One trip. One look. You’ll know.”
“Why do you think they’re alive, lady?” Brescia asked. Her voice was soft with curious wonder. The queen’s face had a fevered look in the gloom, and then, incredibly, she smiled, a luminescent event that transformed her grief into hope.
“I am a wife and a mother. I know the spirit of my family and when it will pass from this flood to the next world. I have not felt it yet. I’ve been on the throne for thirty years, Brescia, all of them with my husband, and together we raised Ren, feeling each heartbeat in his chest. I’ll know, Brescia. You must trust that I would know if they were gone, and they are still close.” Her smile gleamed anew. She was a true believer in that moment, and so was Brescia.
“I’ll dive myself, but not until I have help. Let me summon Creel, and we will go to the barge for you.” And find nothing at best, and at worst, the corpses of kings.
Arthun stood, and her regality came back with that simple act. “I will wait here.”
Brescia nodded, kicking hard for the channel. When a kingdom was at stake, it was best to humor some dreams.
Downward she swam, into the dark, while above, the last queen of Marwai waited, hoping and fearing the very thing she asked for.
Answers.
Silence
East
It might have been the way she dismounted, but the cowled woman felt her attackers waver as her boots hit the grit, small puffs rising from her light impact. She moved like a dancer, or a snake, or both, but her athletic qualities were not at issue.
Her horse and armor were.
To the rough tribes of Silence, a horse was life, and armor was the means to survive between watering holes in a land where there was precious little in the way of law.
Or mercy.
She was smaller than the men and women who stood arrayed before her, smug with their numbers but feeling the beginnings of wonder at why their prey didn’t cower. Or run, given the fact her piebald mare looked fresh enough to gallop all day, but tha
t concern faded when she drew back her hood to reveal a face that was young, scarred, and pale.
“Do you not recognize your queen?” she hissed, voice low and bubbling with venom.
“We have no queen. She’s dead,” the woman said. She was tall and rangy, like everyone in Silence, but there was an intelligent cast to her light eyes that marked her as the leader of the trio.
“And yet here I stand, not a pace away,” Rukisa said. Her lips curled, but there was no joy in the motion, only hunger. With an absent finger, she rubbed at a spot of blood on her leather armor, the surface embossed with swirling serpents and hints of a language from another time.
“Why did you come back?” asked the leader. She was a practical sort, letting her eyes confirm what Rukisa said, though she remained dubious. It was understandable. The former queen was not the same, nor was her appearance. Her black hair was long, not short, face stippled with scars. She wore riding gear, not the gown of a queen who sought magic as her preferred method of power. Magic was the unknown, a catchall phrase for the things Rukisa used in her bloody ascent to power. And now, it seemed she was returning to climb again.
“I had reasons, and that is all you need to know.”
“D’you think you can outrun the justiciars? They’re still hunting you, Rukisa, if that really is—”
Her knife took the man on the left before he could finish his sentence, in and out with a silvery gleam. He toppled quietly to the ground, face contorted in surprise as his heartblood began to wick away into the thirsty sand.
“I have need of a servant,” Rukisa said to the pair, letting her pale eyes drift over them with meaning as she ignored the twitching corpse at her feet.
“I understand,” said the woman, slipping her own knife into the remaining man without hesitation. She wrapped her arm around his chest and bore him to the ground, his bare feet kicking wildly until the blade bit home deep enough to sever his spine.
When she looked up, Rukisa was smiling. “Your name?”
“Hexor, my lady,” said the woman, wiping her blade on the gritty tunic of her victim.
“I’m no lady,” Rukisa said, “but I am a queen.”
Outpost
North
“Another victim,” Nolan said. Across the sky to the extreme north, a ship came apart in silver streaks, blazing into blue and red and then nothing.
“I hate this place,” Avina said. Her breath was a shadowed plume in the frigid night, and she shivered, but not from the cold.
“We have an immediate problem, unlike the poor bastards up there,” Nolan said, pointing at his chest. “We don’t fit in. At all.”
“I might have an answer. Two klicks that way. A—I guess it’s a hunter’s hut, or something,” Cherry said. “Saw it on the descent. It would save us the problem of killing and skinning an entire herd of your favorite creatures—”
“I don’t hate them. I just don’t trust them,” Nolan protested.
“Regardless, hunters have meat. And hides. Might be our best bet, and a shortcut to slipping into the city. It’s not a huge place, and it’s on that granite cliff. We’ll have to tread lightly if we want to start gathering intel now and not later, on the river,” Cherry said.
“Agreed. The river seems like—like a space station. You can be anonymous, but not here. Not in—Sindelaar?” Nolan asked.
“That’s it. Old place, too. To the hut?” Cherry waved north.
“What if the hunter doesn’t want to trade?” Avina asked. She tapped her weapon while speaking.
“I think we can come to an agreement. We’re not animals,” Nolan said, his teeth flashing feral in the night.
“North, then,” Avina agreed.
They set off, the snow less of an issue along the rocky ridges. Weaving between the low, twisted trees, they covered the ground in thirty minutes, slowing when Nolan smelled smoke.
“Wood fire,” he murmured. “See anyone home? I don’t—I’ve got one contact. Make that two, inside the—what do you call that?”
“Cabin,” Avina said. “Log construction. I see something else, too. What’s alongside the wall? Those racks?”
“Hah. That’s what we came for. At least, it’s some of it. Those are hides, and a lot of them,” Cherry said.
“Not stitched together, though. That something you can do, Cherry?” Nolan lifted a brow, hopeful that she could.
She shook her head. “Nope. I mean, I know how, but I don’t have the tools, or the thread. I think you’d need a punch, some mono, or—well, you could use natural stuff. We’d want to, anyway, so we don’t stand out.”
“Then we wake ’em up and try some diplomacy?” Avina asked.
“Something like that.” Nolan began to stalk forward, surprisingly quiet for his size. When he was fifty meters from the cabin, he leaned behind a tree.
A shot rang out, spalling bark from Nolan’s hiding place.
“That’s far enough, ye sneaky arse!”
A man stood in the shadows of the cabin wall, his rifle aimed in Nolan’s general direction.
“No trouble here, boss. Just want to trade,” Nolan called.
“The hell you do. Good thing I had to piss. Girls, c’mon out. Got us a thief,” the man bellowed.
“More like three,” came Cherry’s silken purr, right behind the hunter’s ear. “I’ll take that, pop.” She plucked the rifle from his hands, watching the breath leave him in smoking gouts. “Not going to hurt you. Tell the girls to stand down, whoever they are.”
“I—sheeeit. Mar-bel? Hope?”
“Yes, da?” came the reply through a door that had opened without a sound. Two young women stood inside the frame, lit from behind by a candle. Or two.
“We got guests, who got the upper hand it seems.”
“I’ll fookin—” Mar-bel—or maybe it was Hope—came boiling out into the night, one holding an axe, and the other a primitive shotgun.
“Not one step further,” Cherry said, her voice calm, words low.
“I—da? Shit, she—um, da? There’s a man here too. And a lady,” the shorter girl said.
Nolan stepped forward, pushing the girl’s weapon down. “We need your help. That’s all. And we can pay.”
“Pay? Well whyinell didn’t ye say so?” the man groused. “Also seems like the right thing to do given I’m at somethin’ of a disadvantage. Clarvius Boyer. That’s me.”
“Boyer, the woman behind you is Cherry. I’m Nolan, and this is Avina. Can we go inside? We really do want to trade. Or buy.”
Cherry pulled her gun away, and Boyer smiled at that. He had a shock of red hair, wild from sleep, and every inch of his face told a story. A hard man, but a smart one. His daughters—they could be nothing else—looked, tragically, like his clones, but younger and with finer features.
“Come on in,” Boyer said, then held up a hand. Everyone stiffened. “Wait—you ain’t here to take the girls? Because I’ll fight you to the death. So will they. And they’ll win.”
“No, sir. We need hides for clothes,” Nolan said.
Boyer smiled. “That we got.”
Cable Island
East
Dirge felt the bottle’s heft, wondering if it would be enough. The brandy cost him more than his sword, a number that left a pang of regret even as he slipped into Hopwell’s dingy office.
“Whaddaya want?” came the growl, followed by a wet cough that sounded none too healthy.
“Just to share a drink. Maybe a chat, too,” Dirge said. His confidence grew when Hopwell sat up, unsteady but clearly interested in the bottle. The Cabler reached back to open a wooden shade, flooding the office with sunlight that revealed all manner of vile things.
The office was also an apartment, if a rumpled bed and stacks of filthy clothing were the determining factors in where Hopwell chose to live. Empty bottles, stale crusts of bread, and a pervasive scent of defeat crowded into Dirge’s nose, making him turn away in an attempt to draw a sweet breath. Taking the hint, Hopwell threw the ri
ckety sash upward, letting the smell of river water and dead fish flood inward. It was a considerable improvement.
Hopwell was a study in disorder. Short, round, and unshaven, those were his best qualities, topped by thinning black hair, weeping eyes, and a face bloated from drink and hard living. His shirt, stained and creased beyond help, had several holes in it, exposing small patches of skin that looked vaguely reddened and loose. He coughed again, waving imperiously for the bottle with one hand as his generous chin directed Dirge to a chair that looked tired and dirty. “A drink, then,” Hopwell, murmured, tipping the bottle up with an expression of joyous dread.
“You don’t know me, but”—
“O’course I do. Dirge. Second month on station. Bit of a tight arse, but smarter than the rest of that rabble you’re assigned with.” Hopwell’s eyes looked quite different now, sharp with feral intellect and cleared by the bracing swig of brandy. His transformation was remarkable, if artificially induced.
“Right. To business then since you’ve acquired your legs once more. I need a name, and I’m willing to pay more than that pittance,” Dirge said, pointing to the bottle.
“More than this? Why, you must be a wealthy man indeed if you’re willing to pay an enthusiast of my caliber for information. I can, as you might guess, drink quite a lot when I’m thirsty.” He pulled at the bottle again, wiping his lips on a shoulder with a casual bend of his jellied neck. “I should add that I am always thirsty.”
“My funds are limited, but I understand your need,” Dirge allowed. Best to keep things friendly until he could find a price. Men like Hopwell always had a price, just like Dirge.
“Let’s begin with what you need to know and see if I am in possession of the facts. Perhaps then we can reach an understanding,” Hopwell said, then belched, filling the room with a new and horrible stench.
Lost Kingdom: Book 1 in the Lost Kingdom Series Page 23