The Jade Queen

by Jack Conner

  “It’s a mass-brainwashing device . . . ”

  “I do not like to think of it as such, but in essence -- yes. Literally, it will cleanse their minds of taint. Just think! We can end the war right now, without another shot fired. A peaceful end to the conflict, all our enemies now our allies. Then we must set up our new order, restructure the governments of the world, purge populations of undesirables -- and there will be a lot of those, I can assure you -- and we will have a worldwide, eternal Third Reich. Isn’t it glorious?”

  She felt weak. “Yes . . . glorious.”

  “And it will all begin as soon as Prince Jeselri wakes up and is strong enough to begin work -- or end it, rather. Tomorrow, most likely. Tomorrow, my dear, Germany will rule the world, and we, who have brought it to that point, will each have our own kingdom. You will be a queen, my dear!” His eyes glittered as he looked at her. “You could be my queen.”

  She cleared her throat. “A flattering thought, my lord. I will think it over.”

  He moved on. “Of course, Queen Iasolla will have her own land to rule, and hers will be a marvel. I cannot wait to see Atlantis restored. Perfected. She will be just under the Fuhrer himself. I’m sure he will grant her a special dispensation.”

  “It’s wonderful that she has agreed to help our cause. Did you ever doubt that she would?”

  His face was hard, yet not unhappy. “Oh, there was never a doubt of that, my dear. If she had refused, we would have used her son against her. Threatened to destroy him if she did not play along. I am glad it did not have to come to that. I had taught myself and a select few others how to use certain weapons against her, but I am in truth not sure they would have worked. The best threat was harm to her son. But she has agreed to aid the ascendance of der Fuhrer, to help make him the Emperor of the World as he deserves to be.”

  “How fortunate.” She made herself yawn. “Well, my lord, I cannot wait for tomorrow and our righteous victory, but for the moment I need rest, if you’ll forgive me. It’s been an exhausting few days.”

  He laughed. “Indeed. Bon noche, chere.”

  She smiled and left. She started shaking as soon as she left him, and she didn’t stop when she reached her room.

  Most of the high-level Society members roomed in the Palace, in the only surviving intact wing on the ground floor. Lord Wilhelm alone roomed at the base of the Queen’s tower. The doors had long ago rotted away, and canvas sheets spanned the doorways, which were curved in a vaguely Oriental, somewhat Moorish style. Eliza took a deep breath when she entered her room, pushing aside the canvas sheet, and pressed her back against a wall.

  Tomorrow the world will end! It was too much. Trembling, she moved through the darkness toward her bag and the bottle of liquor that waited there.

  Someone stepped out of the darkness.

  “Don’t scream,” a voice said. “It’s only me.”

  ***

  Lynchmort smiled wolfishly down at her, and she could smell him, all sweat and musk. Thank God, she thought. She started to throw her arms about him, but something about him caught her attention. Even in the shadowed room, he looked different. Gingerly, she reached up to touch his face.

  “You like?” He clicked on a lamp, and she received a better look.

  She started. He looked . . . normal. Well, almost. He was no longer the scarred, one-eyed pirate he had become, but for a moment he was the Lynch she had known before the war, the one she had fallen in love with. He had no scars and his left eye was as it should be, sort of. She could tell as soon as she really looked at it that it wasn’t his actual eye, but it had fooled her for a moment.

  “A marble,” he said. “I’ve been rifling through the diggers’ tents, looking for stuff to use. Once I came on a young woman dressing and got a very interesting offer. I said, ‘Maybe later, after you shave those pine-tree legs of yours.’ Germans! Anyway, I found make-up and a marble, and here I am, just another SS goon.” He raised his left arm, and she could see that his hook was concealed by a filled-in glove.

  She nodded, slowly. “Yes. A while ago I heard the Queen and Lord Wilhelm talking. I thought . . . I hoped . . . it was you. Just what did you do, anyway?”

  “Well, I wasn’t very subtle, I’m afraid. When it comes to entrances, I like to make a statement. Unfortunately, the statement I seemed to have made was “Shoot the man with the eye patch and hook.” Thus: no eye patch and no hook. It’s the only way I got into the palace. I figured that’s where you would be.”

  “And how did you know this was my room?”

  He moved to the cot that was her bed and pulled something out from under the pillow: the handle of a horse whip, elaborately worked but old and frayed. The whip itself had been sawed off.

  “I wonder what you’ve been using this for.”

  Eliza accepted the handle from him, feeling herself grow hot. “Yes, I kept it, damn you. The dirigible went back for our things that first night, there was someone here that could fly it, I was too tired -- anyway, they brought a few suitcases back, as well as some survivors from . . . Never mind. I asked for them to find this.” She replaced the whip handle under her pillow and turned to him.

  He was suddenly pressed up against her, his hand brushing her cheeks. His body felt hot and firm. She wanted with every ounce of her being to throw her arms around him and kiss him, but instead she pushed him away and rifled through her suitcase.

  “Looking for this?”

  He poured liquor into a glass for her and held it out. He already had a glass for himself, mostly empty by now.

  Grateful, she took a long, steadying sip. The liquor burned her throat but felt good going down. She took another.

  He stepped close again. His expression was serious. His fingers brushed her cheek, tucked a loose strain of hair behind an ear. He kissed the corner of her eye, then her cheek, then the corner of her lips. She inhaled the scent of him, all raw and musky, and she trembled again, this time pleasurably. He looked into her eyes.

  “We may not get another chance,” he said. It was almost a whisper.

  She sipped. Sat her glass down. “We sure won’t if we allow these idiots to take over the world. We have to stop them.”

  “Agreed.”

  Quickly she told him what Wilhelm had just revealed, about the Atlantan technology that would enslave the world to the whims of Hitler. “I think it will be worse than that,” she added. “I don’t think Queen Iasolla has any love of the Third Reich, only sense enough to use the Society for her own ends. If she becomes empress of the world, God help us all. I don’t think she even considers herself human, and she disdains those that do. Those that are.”

  “Then there’s only one thing to do.”

  “What?”

  “Kill the Prince. Do it now, while the Queen’s away and he’s helpless.”

  “He’s guarded by six of Wilhelm’s best soldiers, and you’re not even armed!”

  He shrugged. “You can order the soldiers to leave their post. When they’re gone, I sneak in and kill the Prince. Simple as anything. With any luck, the Queen will be so distraught she’ll kill herself.”

  She stared at him. “I don’t think she’s the suicidal type. Still . . .”

  He grinned. “Then let’s be at it.” He started for the door.

  She grabbed his arm. “There’s one flaw in your plan. What can I say to the soldiers that will make them leave their post? How can I get them to follow me?”

  “Tell them you saw me. That should do it.”

  “Yes, but perhaps it would be better if they did see you.”

  “Come again?”

  “You lead them off, and I kill the Prince.”

  “I’m flattered that you think I could elude or fight off six troopers, but I like my idea better.”

  “Yes, but as soon as I lead them off, they will know I lied, and when they hear that the Prince is dead they’ll know I led them away from their duty for the sole purpose of having you kill him, and they’ll string me from the nea
rest tree, only after torturing me for information about you. You’ll be hunted, I’ll be dead or with no fingernails, and meanwhile the Queen will still be living, and I think if she had to she could probably get the doomsday machines running herself. It would be like an architect putting the final polish on a building. It would be rough, but she knows the principles.” She took a breath. “Look, I would give my life to stop them, but as long as the Queen lives, I need to remain in place to be close to her -- to kill her if I can.”

  He studied her. “Are you prepared to kill the Prince? Can you?”

  “I killed Dr. Jung, Commander Higgins, and all those people at Brookshire when I released the Bone Men.”

  “You did what?”

  The memory made her nauseous. “The point is -- I could kill him. I will kill him.” She reached into her suitcase and withdrew a long knife with a deer-antler handle. It had been her husband’s hunting knife. The blade glimmered even in the dim light, sharp enough to cut the throat of a sleeping god.

  Lynch looked at her carefully. At last he nodded. “Then let’s do it.”

  ***

  Separately they slipped from the room. Heart thumping, Eliza waited at the base of the Queen’s tower, where the grand stairs joined an intersection of high halls. She heard the thumping of boots before she saw anyone and drew back into the shadows.

  Lynch raced by, followed by the troopers. A gun cracked. Eliza almost cried out.

  Lynch ran on, turned a corner, and the troopers pursued. Eliza hoped she hadn’t just killed him with her plan. She had naively assumed he could outwit or overpower half a dozen elite SS troops, but Lynch wasn’t the unstoppable force he had become in her mind. He was a man, and mortal, of flesh and blood, and the troopers could kill him any of a thousand ways, or worse. She wasn’t the only one with fingernails to be pulled or bones to be broken.

  I better make this worth it.

  She gulped down a deep breath and mounted the stairs.

  The sounds of shots and clicking boot heels retreated, and she absorbed the cool stillness of the tower. The rest of the palace’s walls were dull and gray from time and neglect, but here the walls glinted and dazzled. Of red jade with scrollwork of green and gold, it overwhelmed the eye. Ornate windows gave dizzying glimpses of the city.

  Reaching the top of the tower, or at least the last intact level, she found a single trooper on the landing.

  Though tense, he did not level his gun at her.

  “I heard the commotion!” she gasped, making her eyes go wide. “What’s going on? Is the Prince in jeopardy?”

  “Nein. He sleeps safely, Lady. The saboteur tried to assassinate him.” He patted his gun boldly. “He did not think to see us.”

  She sighed in relief and stepped closer to him, as if for protection. “I am so glad you were here. Why did you not go off with your brothers? Ah. Someone must remain to guard the Prince.”

  He snorted in irritation. “They had better not get him without me. I would never hear the end of it.”

  “That would be a shame.”

  “Oh, I -- ”

  She drove the knife into his abdomen. It had been tucked into her rear waistband. His mouth opened and his hands reached out, not to her, but the wound. She stabbed him again, and again. He fell to the floor, twitching. She stared at her bloody knife and fought the urge to vomit.

  She wiped it off on his leg, stuck it back in her waistband and entered the Queen’s lair. The door, unlike the others, was fashioned of jade. It had not rotted like the wooden ones, and the knob turned easily under her hand. It reassured her that the ancient Atlantans, advanced as they were, still used things so prosaic as doorknobs.

  She stepped into the suite, at once overcome by all the colors and smells. The suite had been reworked and restored to something of the splendor of the Queen’s age. Golden hangings covered the walls, and scarlet swaths depended from the ceilings. Beautiful but strange pieces of jade furniture filled out the rooms, and somewhere something like incense emitted the smell of jasmine. She saw no burning stalks but did see stones set out in ornate braziers. The smell thickened near them.

  The rooms twisted and blended with each other in odd ways, but she found the Prince in the largest room toward the rear of the suite, the most elaborate of all the rooms, and the most beautiful. Eliza knew this suite had not originally been the Prince’s -- that would have been on a top level, and this had not been the top during his normal lifetime -- so perhaps a concubine or wife had lived here. In any case, the jade walls were of many hues, and the colors seemed to change moment by moment in artistic and subtle ways. The walls were curved to provide an intimate, almost cave-like feel, and yet it occupied a great deal of space.

  The Prince lay on a large bed, surely brought here (or assembled here) just for the royal pair. He slept under fine burgundy covers. Eliza approached him, marveling again at how handsome he was. His long golden hair flowed to either side of his square-jawed face, and his full, sensuous lips expelled even puffs of air. His mighty chest rose and fell, rose and fell, and one of his naked arms was flung outside of the covers, nearly as thick as a tree trunk; the Queen hadn’t lied. His hands were large, the fingers thick but long and nimble. Eliza’s own breath quickened just to look at him.

  A shame to kill such a fine specimen . . . After all, Eliza didn’t even know if he were as bad as his mother. He might balk at activating the doomsday device. Perhaps she could reason with him . . .

  She couldn’t take the chance, and the chances were slim. He had been the one to build the device in the first place, after all.

  She grabbed up a pillow from a nearby divan and approached the sleeping prince. Her breaths grew more rapid as she neared him. She no longer felt hot but cold, ice cold. Her vision wavered. She drew next to him. She would smother him in his sleep with the pillow and no one would be the wiser. If he resisted, she would slit his perfect throat, but it would be better if the Queen assumed he had merely not been resurrected successfully -- that it was a flaw in the design of his sarcophagus. That way Iasolla wouldn’t initiate a hunt for the killer.

  Eliza raised the pillow over the Prince’s face.

  The Pince’s eyes opened.

  They were the deepest blue, the prettiest eyes Eliza had ever seen. They merely fluttered open, then closed again, but behind the closed lids she saw movement. The Prince stirred in his sleep. A powerful hand opened and closed.

  Eliza grabbed the top of his head with her left hand, clutching him by the hair, and brought the pillow toward his face with her right.

  His eyes opened again.

  She felt his body tense, go rigid. The air heated around her. She knew that if he felt threatened he could kill her instantly.

  She placed the pillow under his head and set him back onto it gently, pretending that she hadn’t noticed his sudden awareness. That done, she stepped back and sighed, as if contemplating a job well done. She just casually allowed her eyes to rove over his face and meet his, then jumped and exclaimed, “You’re awake!”

  He smiled lazily. Pulling her toward him, he kissed her belly and breasts through her blouse.

  “Truly a pleasant gift to wake up to,” he murmured. He wore the same sort of jewel necklace his mother did, and Eliza could understand his words. As he sat up, his sheets slipped down, and he ripped them away with the hand not holding Eliza.

  His member stood up, stiff and proud.

  She stepped back, forcing his hands away. “I’m not a wake-up present,” she said. “I’m just . . . checking on you.”

  “Check on this.” He grabbed himself and laughed.

  “Um. Yes. Let me . . . just . . . ”

  She fled.

  At the entrance to the suite, she stumbled the corpse of the trooper.

  “Damn.” Nothing was easy.

  She removed his jacket and cleaned up the blood as best she could. Then she wrapped it about his middle so no more blood would spill out and, as carefully as she could, she rolled him down the stairs
. It took some effort, and she was sweating by the time she reached Lord Wilhelm’s suite at the base of the tower. There were no janitor’s rooms or other places to hide the body, and she could not very well drag the corpse throughout the palace looking for a place to dispose of it.

  Grunting and straining, she pulled the body into Lord Wilhelm’s rooms, hoping, praying he wasn’t there -- surely the hunt for Lynch would have drawn him away if he had been. She heard nothing -- no talking, no snoring. Finding a shadowed corner of the suite, she dragged the body into it.

  She took a moment to clean herself and get her breath, then marched into the Throne Room, put a big smile on her face and announced brightly, “The Prince is awake! Long live the Prince!”

  Chapter 23

  Lynch pounded through the halls toward the front of the palace, taking the small side halls he had discovered during the last hour. The troopers chased him, yelling orders for him to stop. Occasionally one fired, but he made sure to never stay in the open for more than a few seconds.

  He plunged into one of the larger rooms -- a ruin. Collapsing columns and ceiling had smashed the floor to bits, creating a jagged maze heaped with debris. One of the pieces of ceiling had opened a rift in the floor, a small crevice dropping away into the city’s sewers or underworld. Lynch had noticed it earlier.

  He shimmied down the hole. A horrid reek issued up. Surely not the sewers, then -- their smell would have dried out millennia ago. Maybe a vent of some sort. Trying to ignore it, he waited for the thunder of the troopers’ boots to pass him by. It took too long.

  When they’d gone, he rose from the crevice, crept back to the rear of the palace and entered Eliza’s bedroom suite. He had led the troopers toward the front of the palace and with any luck they would continue their search for him outside. If they went room to room, things could get dicey.

  He smoked a cigarette and drank a glass of liquor, and tried to laugh at himself for his shaky hand.

  Despite himself, nerves gripped him. Eliza was upstairs risking her life. If she were caught --