The Jade Queen

by Jack Conner

  “And you will use the device for the Fatherland?” Lord Wilhelm said, his voice stern. “You will subdue the enemies of Germany.” It was not a question. There was an edge to his voice that hinted at danger if the wrong response was given.

  She nodded, though she showed no sign of fear. “Only find my son.”

  He relaxed. “Excavations are already underway. Soon, my queen, the world will kneel at our feet.”

  She flicked her hand. “Fetch me my meal.”

  PART THREE

  THE CITY ABOVE

  Chapter 21

  Lynch was smoking a cigarette as the mountain came into view. Sunlight warmed his skin, and sweat soaked into the rough shirt he wore -- bought, like the rest of his clothes, off various soldiers. He shaded his eye to get a better look at the approaching peak.

  “That’s it, aye? Give me two of them, a bottle of your finest and call it night to remember.”

  He rode atop of one of the troop transports. They’d been navigating their way through the mountains for the last two days and the soldiers that occupied the metal top with him did not look so cheerful. They sweated, smoked, played cards and kept their faces cool by dipping shirts in water and tying them around their heads. They alternated with the boys below, some riding on top while others rode in cozy shade. There were too many soldiers and too few transports.

  “I just wish I knew what they were about,” said one young private. “I mean, what’re we assaulting the fucking mountain for, anyway?”

  “They’re Krauts, ain’t they?” said another. “Enough reason for me.”

  “Then just what sort of damned Nazis are they? They burned the Palace down from some sort of damned dirigible. I mean, what the fuck? And then they sail off to this damned peak -- for what? It just don’t make no sense. And they’ve repelled everything we’ve thrown at ‘em with only a handful of people, from what I heard.”

  An older soldier scoffed. He and some of the others played cards. Lynch had been playing with them, but he’d been losing too heavily and had called it quits. “They’ve held the mountain because of the narrow passes and the high ground, that’s all,” said the old soldier. “Till now, the boys haven’t had the strength to push through, but now we’re here, we’ll slaughter ‘em. We’ll be havin’ roast beef on that damned peak by sundown.”

  At last the convoy of transports and tanks arrived at the base of the mountain, where an encampment already sprawled, having been erected only days before. New tents went up for the arriving troops. It had been the men already here that had mounted the previous assaults on the mountain, and they looked grim and harried, relieved to see reinforcements. The generals conducting the war on the Front had not been able to send very many to battle Lord Wilhelm and the others on the mountain, deeming them a mysterious but minor threat, but Queen Fontaine had made sure to send more troops just the same; prior to this they had been guarding Gaston.

  Lynch disembarked with the others, glad to be off the swaying, baking top of the transport. Officers drew him aside. “We understand you’ve been especially appointed by Her Majesty,” one said.

  Lynch took the last drag on his cigarette and flung it away. “That’s right. I need to know everything you can tell me about the mountain.”

  “We already have a briefing planned for the soldiers. Wait till then.”

  “I won’t be going on the assault,” Lynch said.

  The man frowned. “Then why are you here?”

  “I’m going up the mountain alone.”

  “You’re mad! It’s almost sundown. You’ll break your neck. You’re mad!” he said again for emphasis.

  “Very likely. Probably all the mercury. It just tastes so good! Nevertheless, I go up the mountain alone, just like Moses. Don’t expect any tablets when I come down, though, and if I see a golden calf -- well, let’s just say I enjoy a pagan ritual as much as the next man.”

  The man looked at him. He looked at his watch. “Very well.”

  A colonel personally briefed Lynch, showing him maps, detailing to him the prior assaults. “We’ve been coordinating with the Air Force. They’ve set up an airfield about five klicks east. So far they’ve only launched one run. As soon as the bombers drew near the airspace over the peak, they burst into flame and fell from the sky. We saw it from here, bright flashes of light, then smoke . . . going down.” He let a beat go by. “There was no sign of rockets, no anti-aircraft emplacements, nothing.” He looked ashen. It was clear he feared whoever had brought the aircraft down, his fear only increased by lack of understanding.

  “It’s nothing supernatural,” Lynch assured him. At least I hope not. “Just some old-world savvy. We’ll flush them out, don’t you worry. Now -- I need a bottle of something strong, a good meal, maybe some cocaine, a few guns, a prostitute if possible, and some more of those excellent cigarettes. Any combination of these things will be helpful. Take your time. I won’t leave until midnight.”

  Midnight found him nutritionally sated, rested, sexually unsatisfied, and beginning a long hike up the mountain. He had showered, brushed his teeth and changed into a clean set of clothes (won in a game of cards) to remove any smell a day of sweating and smoking may have given him. Dark brought with it a damp cold, and it settled on him with skeletal fingers. He shivered as he walked. Despite his brave words to the colonel, he was quite worried about the turns things had taken. He had assumed taking over Casveigh was high on the Society’s agenda, but apparently it was one of a list of optional things to do on their way to -- where? What exactly was their ultimate goal? What could a queen from primal times inflict on the modern world? The Society meant for her to unleash some calamity, Lynch was certain, but he couldn’t fathom what. She had the means to incinerate palaces, destroy bombers and fighter planes, even repel land invasions, all by herself. The thought of what she could do with whatever help she sought on the mountaintop was both awe-inspiring and terrifying.

  He brooded on it as he worked his way up the mountain, switching back and forth up the inclines at times. He had circled around from the soldiers’ encampment, assuming most of the enemy’s forces would be deployed in that direction. Of course the Society members were no fools, and they would prepare for a sneak attack as well. There would be patrols. Sentries. Lynch went cautiously. The mountain sloped steeply here, and he sometimes had to scale near-vertical rock surfaces, no easy task with one hand. Much of it was covered in what he thought of as goat-slopes, and indeed several of the horned devils baaed at him as he pressed up the steep, grassy inclines. His breaths came rapidly, and he started to sweat even more precipitously than he had under the blazing sun. His legs burned, as well as his back and arms.

  Near dawn, cold and hungry once more, he caught the waft of cigarette smoke. Just a trace, a vague hint on the wind, but it stopped him in his tracks. All his senses wound into high alert.

  He had been passing up a craggy slope, the summit not far above, and he’d hoped to reach it before full light.

  Warily, slowly, he crouched down. He scanned the murky darkness above. The scent could not have come from far away.

  There! Movement. An outcropping of rock, situated high on the slopes, pressed flush against a near-vertical stone wall. Unassailable from the front.

  Lynch considered. He could not rush the sentry. The man would shoot him with his sniper rifle or whatever he had before Lynch made it five paces. He was only about fifteen meters away, maybe less, but at the moment it was an enormous gulf. Lynch had been picking his way through the boulders or else the man would have seen him by now.

  Of course, Lynch was armed. He could attempt to find a good angle and shoot the sentry. But even if he was successful the sound would alert others. And it would very likely ruin the man’s uniform. Lynch remembered how well the troopers’ uniform had served him at Brookshire and was determined to find another.

  Very slowly, he eased back the way he had come, keeping boulders between him and the sentry. When he was out of sight, he found a wall of rock
and climbed it. He sweated and strained, his tired muscles protesting, his hook scrabbling maddeningly at the rock. At last he threw himself over the lip and lay panting. Once recovered, he slowly and carefully made his way back toward the sentry’s position, scanning the ground for suitable rocks on the way, and soon was staring down over the edge of a cliff.

  The sentry had put his back to a wall, and as the dawn sun peeked over the jagged horizon Lynch studied the shadow-draped boulders at the cliff’s base. There! The man waited, still and patient, crouched over a sniper rifle, one eye to its scope. A radio pack sat close by.

  Lynch found a likely stone. It took some doing with one hand and a hook. He had to use his feet to aid him in unearthing the large, flat rock, but at last he tugged it free. Using his right hand to grip one side and his left forearm to prop up the other, he staggered back to the cliff’s edge, peered over once more, calculated his trajectory, and hurled the rock.

  He held his breath. If he missed . . .

  The rock slammed down with horrifying force, and for a heart-stopping moment Lynch thought he had missed.

  The rock struck the man’s back. It drove him to the ground, killing him instantly. His last thought as he peered through the scope was doubtless a happy fantasy about sniping someone just like Lynch.

  In the next life, pal, Lynch thought.

  Painstakingly, he made his way down to the outcropping of rock and appraised the damage to the sentry’s uniform. The back of the shirt was a mess, but the man had taken off his jacket and hung it on a nearby stone to better allow arm movement. Still serviceable, Lynch decided. He donned the clothes, a wearying process with one hand, and hid the damage to the back of the man’s shirt with the jacket. Satisfied but exhausted, he stole the man’s cigarettes and moved back up toward the summit.

  He donned the sentry’s black leather gloves, hiding his hook, and stuffed his eye patch in a pocket. Surely the members of the Society would by this point shoot any man with a hook and eye patch. In the dim light he doubted if anyone would notice his missing eye and the scar tissue there, but anyway it was much less obvious than the patch; a casual observer would just see a shadow where an eye should be and would likely not even be moved to look twice. Hopefully.

  Sweaty and out of breath, Lynch reached the summit. A patrol of troopers swept by, guns glinting in the dawn light. Not trusting his disguise, Lynch shrank into the shadows of a copse of trees. The troopers marched by, cutting a circumference around the mountaintop. Something about their trajectory struck him as interesting. They moved almost as if they followed a certain path, but he saw none.

  When they had moved on, he crept forward. He saw tents and shapes that might be ruins ahead, sprawled all over the uneven summit of the mountain. Cook fires trailed up clearly. He smelled roasting meat and started to salivate. His stomach rumbled. He walked faster.

  A prickling sensation crawled up his spine. He felt . . . a hum.

  Taking a deep breath, he forced himself to stop. What am I missing? Frowning, he scanned the area. Then, remembering the trooper’s odd trajectory, he studied the ground.

  By the faint red glow of dawn, something gleamed, inset in the earth. Something turquoise. It was a solid band perhaps ten centimeters wide and it ran right to left as far as he could see. Dirt and debris largely covered it. Occasionally it ran beneath a tree or boulder. The turquoise band seemed to curve around the sides of the summit, and Lynch guessed it made a complete circle around the peak, marking the circumference of the mountaintop.

  The ruins . . . Had this been a city, a settlement? If so, it must have been established by the Atlantan survivors -- why else would the Queen be interested? -- and they had possessed strange technology, Lynch knew full well.

  The turquoise band was not four meters from him. He would have to step over it to enter the city, if that’s what it was. Perhaps it was decorative. Perhaps inert. He edged closer. The humming increased, a faint grating in the back of his teeth, in his lower vertebrae, a trembling in his bowels. If he hadn’t been on edge, he might not have noticed it.

  The troopers had been walking along the inside of the band, following it in a curving path around the circumference of the city.

  Lynch made some wild conclusions, probably erroneous, but he made them anyway. First and foremost, he assumed that the thing would sense him if he crossed over and that that was the thing’s purpose, to alert the city’s inhabitants, or at least some of them, of any comings and goings. There had been a reason the troopers had not crossed over.

  “Goddamnit,” he said.

  He waited for the troopers to return. It took a long time. The settlement was larger than he had thought. When they did, they found him without his jacket, crawling up the slope. He had nicked his chest and had smeared the blood in his empty eye socket.

  The troopers shouted. They rushed over, crossing the turquoise line. They all knelt over him, shouting questions, some in English, some German.

  The leader shoved them back and knelt over him. “Give him room to breathe. Good God, soldier, what happened?”

  “My eye!” Lynch screamed, injecting a German accent. “He took my eye!” He let out a howl of agony and convulsed. He knew he looked ragged, dirty, his shirt torn and bloody on the back, and he appeared to have just had his eye ripped out. The glove still concealed his hook and he had stuffed the fingers with mud. “The bastard ripped out my eye and shoved it in his own empty socket! The stinking cripple replaced his missing eye with mine!”

  The leader jumped up. “It is he, must be! The James character. Now he will appear to have two eyes.”

  “He is a fiend!” one of the troopers said.

  “Fiendishly clever, yes.” The leader pointed down at Lynch. “Get him to the infirmary. I want a full report when he is lucid.”

  “Right away, Brigadefuhrer.”

  They carried Lynch, who writhed and mewled, over the turquoise line -- he felt an electric ripple pass through him -- and into the encampment. They took him past vegetation-covered ruins and tent after tent. At last they bore him into a certain tent, where a nurse was cleaning syringes and preparing the infirmary for the day. “Get the doctor!” one of the soldiers snapped. “It’s an emergency!” The nurse curtsied and ran to fetch the doctor. Minutes later an irritated-looking man in his mid-forties entered, wiping his mouth. He had been caught at breakfast. His breath, as he bent over Lynch, stank of sausage and onions.

  “Mien Got!” the doctor said.

  Lynch writhed and mewled. “It hurts! He took my eeeeyyyyeee!”

  “Hold him down,” the doctor snapped to the soldiers. “I will give him something for the pain.”

  Lynch hesitated. Just a little lift . . .

  “No!” he said. “I need to be lucid to give my report!”

  “Take the meds, brother,” one trooper said. “We know what we need to know. For God’s sake, you just had your eye ripped out. I want morphine just looking at you.”

  They held him down while the doctor injected the morphine into his arm. In moments Lynch floated on clouds made of honey and cotton. An urgency burned in him somewhere, but it was falling further and further away. He felt good. Really good. Everything was going to be just fine.

  “Wait outside,” he heard the doctor say, the words blurry and filtered through seas of wonderful fluffy cotton. “I’ll tend him.”

  The troopers clicked their heels and left. The doctor sighed, exchanged words with the nurse in German, and turned back to Lynch. Lynch smiled up at him. The doctor bent over Lynch again.

  “The bleeding seems to have stopped,” the doctor said. “Curious. I don’t . . .”

  Lynch struck him over the head. He had shoved a small stone in a pocket, and he gripped it in his fist as he swung. The blow landed clumsily, but it was heavy enough to sink the doctor to his knees.

  During his career as a junkie, Lynch had experimented with and fallen in love with morphine, opium’s wayward child, but it had not tempted him from his true love. Thu
s, though he appreciated the effects, he was not paralyzed by them.

  The nurse opened her mouth to scream. Lynch lunged clumsily for her and tackled her to the ground, stifling her. She blurred and swayed below him.

  “’m sorry, ‘m lady,” he mumbled and punched her -- or tried to.

  He missed. She hit him on the side of the head. Kneed him in the crotch. Agony flared. He punched again. The blow landed, and she sagged.

  Panting, he climbed laboriously to his feet just in time to see the doctor rush him with a scalpel. Lynch swayed aside, nearly fell, and brought his stone-weighted fist against the doctor’s face. The doctor reeled backward. Lynch struck again, feeling his knuckles jar, his skin peel. The doctor slumped to the floor.

  Breathing heavily, blinking his eye, Lynch gagged and bound both doctor and nurse, then dragged them behind a fold-out partition perhaps used to give recovering patients privacy. It would only buy a few moments after someone entered the infirmary, but Lynch would take it.

  He cleaned himself as best he could, got his bearings, tried to shake off the effects of the morphine -- with limited success -- and donned the doctor’s white jacket. It would hide the bloody tear in back of his shirt, if nothing else. He buttoned the jacket up to the top -- a painful process: buttons always were -- to conceal the uniform beneath, hoping no one would notice the soldier boots. He cursed the fact that he’d had to leave the sentry’s side arm behind (as well as Lynch’s own weapons) to make his story more credible to the troopers.

  He ducked under the rear flap. Tottering slightly, he joined the press of morning traffic. People dressed for digging streamed all around him, yawning or drinking their morning tea and coffee. Post-dawn sunlight warmed his skin, but he still felt the chill night wind through his hair.