NOVEL NEXT 105. The Queen
There were halfeaten corpsewalkers whose empty sockets tracked their passing along the avenues of the dead. Legless convicts out of paupers graves who humped alongside on the stumps of their wrists like sealions with split tongues lolling out of their gibbering jaws. Lumbering troopers armored in terracotta and flat fungi mushrooming out of their scapula like pauldrons to feed off their flesh. Their rags threadbare, their waxen skin showing through, their fingernails protruding from sunken beds. A condemned court, its final decay forestalled by the will of the one who had rescued them from oblivion. They crowded around the living with no word spoken, with no will of their own but the final will of creation called entropy. Overhead balconies sagged under their stamping and underfoot children ran ahead of the company looking over their shoulders just as if they had never died, as if each was aged but eight or ten or twelve, their aging abeyed, their youth deathless these thirty years.
He walked through them at the brigadier's side. The winter sun shining off his new longsword bare in his right fist and his left arm thrust out and shoving through the throng. There upon the avenues of the dead a thousand miles from anyplace familiar he felt as if he was finally home. He saw dreadlocked northmen in buffalo hide coats with their blue eyes frozen over. He saw horseless cavaliers of that very company whose names he knew with their tunics torn open and dried blood yet upon their unwashed cheeks and he saw a band of swarmfeeders wearing the scalps of their victims and with their sackfuls of flies wriggling off of their belts alongside broken arms of every campaign of legend, jousting lances with favors yet tied on and leaden war clubs and longbows strung up with the gut of swine or cat or perhaps man and them armored in the skullcups of men with skin stitched between and there a nose hanging off a rawhide shield and parading also in the crowd a cohort of naked orckin, hair beaded with teeth and wielding farming implements for they had been raised out of the deadland camps. He saw these horrors and others and they were nothing to him because he was to stand at her right side. He was to be her strong right arm. As she had always promised.
In this manner they passed to the forum. A carnival of grotesques come to parlay with she who elected to tend the plagued while her husband the king fled to the new seat, she who perished in the second month of that first apocalypse, she who was unknowingly raised within her own coffin and by tooth and nail did gnash and claw her way through the lead-lined wood and six feet of wormy earth with the manstone heirloom set in gold about her neck.
She awaited them on a scaffold. Its trapdoor was open and the unraveled braids of the gallows drifted above her head in a rising wind. Her face was hidden behind an ivory mask scrimshawed with an intricate depiction of her death and resurrection and her hair was dull in its silver net and her lips were a pale forget-me-not blue as if painted by the wind. The remains of Uhquah's company and the score of riders in the brigadier's squadron now passed into her forum and with an upheld palm the queen bid them halt.
He stopped when the brigadier did. She sat stock still in her saddle and cleared her throat to address the royal audience. His eyes roved the dead and the damned, searching for where the throng was thinnest, for anywhere he might cut through if they needed to flee. As the brigadier began to speak he tried to listen but there was another voice insistent in his ear.
"I suppose ye got what ye came for," said Mym.
He didn't reply. The brigadier was saying something about the baron and the king, about an ancient matrilineage lost perhaps, or buried, or else struck from memory by those it threatened.
"I suppose ye never really cared about that otauress with all the vines creepin round her horns. Or that wee goblin friend she had. Hell it was me and Khaz who freed em after all, and all the others the armiger didn't burn te bits."
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He frowned.
"I suppose yer formerly dead sailor friend wasn't really any friend of yers neither. He was just followin ye around without askin, savin yer life without regard fer how ye might feel about it and knowin in yer black heart ye weren't worth the trouble. Same goes fer that one-tusked fellow ye left in charge back at yer home. But then I suppose that's not yer home anymore. I suppose it never was."
He half turned his head. She stood behind him with his shadow across her face. She too was looking out at the crowd but then her eyes flicked up to his.
"Cousins will miss ye."
"Let up," he said.
"Or what? Ye'll leave?"
"Let up Mym."
"No."
Now the brigadier was accolading her deeds and he knew her final argument would be drawn from these as if they were maxims and her moxie undeniable, a foregone conclusion proofed by her accord at maelstrom with No Man, her beholding the fifth hydratic, her rejecting the directive of internment and her late liberation of the camps, all stories he would have liked to have listened to if only the dwarf would let him.
"You told me to do what felt right," he said.
"Aye and breakin yer oath isn't it. Ye owe the stones a life, remember? I told em so on yer behalf. We're both stuck in tight as quartz in granite. Ye go and give yers over te this old mudgeon and ye'll be forsakin mine."
"I know."
"Ye know? Ye fuckin know? And yet still goin through with it?"
"She asks me to serve so I must serve. I owe her everything."
"Ye don't owe her two ounces of nakshit."
He shook his head. "You don't understand. She saved me from the camps."
"I understand better than ye do ye hogbrained fishscaler. Those camps knit yer folk together. She took ye out of em and made ye dependent on her. Allowed her te call ye Orc and make sure ye were everythin but. Where I come from that's stealin a life not savin it. Just cause some human made a picturebook of what orcs used te be and she read it doesn't mean she gets te decide yer life for ye."
"I can't give you what you want."
"Aye and there isn't a dwarf livin who can smelt gold from tin."
"I'm sorry. My debt to her precedes all others."
"The stones are eldest of all." She clasped her hand around his swordarm just above the campwire. "Their creditin comes from the very beginnin and there's no precedin that."
"I must try to do as she asks."
Her grip tightened. "No ye don't."
"You going to drag me off?"
"Aye if ye make me."
"Orc," said the brigadier.
He spun and saw the woman still turned toward the queen but now looking down upon him and he felt as if he was again a cub and she had just caught him stealing a handpie off the windowsill. "Maam?"
"The queen addresses you."
He looked at the masked lady upon the platform and her arm was outstretched and finger thrust toward him as if she were the end of all things or the beginning of oblivion called Death. Her mouth glistened like a lamprey's maw and her voice rasped out as if her lungs were filled with the same plague hauled about by her warriors. "Bring them to me," she said.
Mym's hand clamped harder around his arm. "That bonehoarder's pointin at us isn't she?"
"Yeah."
Ahead of them the crowd of the dead shuffled apart and a path cleared to the gallows as if they were to mount its scaffold.
"Fuckin hell Orc," breathed Mym and she said no more.