by Ari Marmell
Gork gave some brief thought to refusing, and then, with a small sigh, he rose and stepped through the door. Katim followed an instant later.
“Hey!” Cræosh hissed in a strangled whisper. “What the fuck are you two doing?!”
“She knows we're here, Cræosh,” the kobold said in a normal tone of voice. “She's invited us in.”
“Oh.” Cræosh scowled. “I guess, in that case…”
The squad filed in on the kobold's heels, several of them aiming satisfied glances at the chained demon.
“It's a vivisection table,” Gimmol whispered to the others. He held off on mentioning that the tiny straps holding the imp were probably intended for human children. He was afraid that that fact wouldn't bother his companions as much as it did him.
“How splendid!” It was Queen Anne's voice again. “It's so good to get together with old friends.” Slowly, the Charnel King's bride stepped out from behind the curious stone table.
Queen Anne was completely nude, although it took the squad a moment to realize it. Her long, lustrous hair was gone, her scalp shaved bare, and every inch of her body was covered in swirling runes and intricate sigils. Gork, for one, couldn't begin to guess if they were painted on or actual tattoos.
“That must've taken a while,” Cræosh commented.
“I am patient,” she said simply. Then she frowned. “Up to a point. I’m afraid that after you'd been gone so long, however, I found my patience running rather thin.”
“Yeah,” Cræosh said, “I see you started without us.” He glanced at the laboratory around him, ending on the items scattered by the queen's bare feet. “I see the bones,” he told her. The others held their breaths, watching for her reaction. “And the flower, and the heart, and the cobwebs. You've got all kinds of herbs and shit here—that should take care of the more mundane ingredients. And right there,” he added, pointing to Shreckt, “you've got a demon whose soul you can suck.” He grinned. “But what about the relic? We've still got that, you know.”
“I see you've discovered my little secret,” Queen Anne breathed, and her voice was no longer friendly. “May I ask how you pieced it together?”
“Wasn't too hard. Hell, you sent us after most of the shit ourselves.”
“But I never told you what for.”
Cræosh shrugged. “Just lucky, I guess.”
Gork heard Gimmol sigh in relief that the orc hadn't revealed his secret.
Queen Anne advanced on the impudent orc. “Do you really think you can hide the answers from me?”
“Maybe. Do you really think that's an appropriate fashion statement for this time of year? I'd think you'd be fucking freezing.”
Keep talking, keep talking… Casually, desperate not to draw the queen's attention from the orc, Gork reached into his pouch for Morthûl's talisman. He winced in anticipated pain and shoved his hand into the skull's mouth to prevent it from chattering. It proved unnecessary, for the thing remained completely silent. Stars, I hope Gimmol didn't really use it up! Slowly he lowered it to the floor at his feet and then stepped forward, putting himself between the marble icon and Queen Anne.
“…suppose it doesn't really matter all that much,” she was saying when he once again began to pay attention. “So you figured out what I’m doing. Congratulations. Now what, my dears? Are you going to give me the relic?”
“Well, since you asked so nicely…” Cræosh began, clearly relishing what was to come.
But Gimmol shook his head, glancing up and down as he traced the symbols in their intricate ballet across the queen's skin. “It doesn't matter,” he whispered. The others couldn't tell if he was speaking to them, or to himself. “It doesn't make a damn bit of difference. She's got what she needs.”
Queen Anne smiled, a radiant expression, tinted by madness. “You didn't really think I would start a ritual I couldn't finish, did you?” she asked. Slowly she snaked one arm down behind the table. When she lifted it again, she held a wave-bladed dagger, less than six inches long, of tarnished bronze.
“And what god does that belong to?” Cræosh grumbled.
“Don't be silly, dear orc. If just anyone had heard of him, he wouldn't be forgotten, would he?
“When it became obvious that you weren't on your way back to me,” she continued, “I was forced to send Rupert out to complete the job you'd…” Her brow furrowed. “Where is Rupert?” she demanded.
Gork glanced behind him and had to fake a sudden coughing fit to cover his startled yelp. The skull was gone! In its place, a deep hole, perfectly circular, had appeared in the solid stone of the floor. A hint of movement deep within tugged at his eye, but he swiftly looked away, still determined to avoid notice.
And just as well, since if he hadn't been paying attention to what happened next, he'd never have believed it.
“He got in our way,” Cræosh said in answer to the queen's query. “So we killed him.” He grinned widely. “That was right before we burned your entire garden right down to the fucking ground.”
Gimmol put his head in his hands and moaned, Fezeill gawped incredulously at the orc, and even Katim whimpered. Not even Cræosh could have just said that, could he?
In desperation, Gork again glanced back at the hole—and saw, with a nauseating combination of revulsion and relief, that a small horde of roaches and beetles had begun to swarm from the shaft. “Come on,” he whispered so softly even he barely heard it. “Come on.…”
Queen Anne stood petrified, the sigils dark against her suddenly bloodless skin. “You didn't!” she breathed. It was virtually a plea.
Cræosh scowled. “Actually, I’m surprised you didn't sense it, you're such a high-and-mighty sorceress.” He blatantly leered down at the queen's naked form, then back unabashedly to meet her gaze. “Obviously, your body's held up to the years a lot better than your mind. Probably a good thing we interrupted before you could ruin it, too.”
Cræosh should have died on the spot, his organs boiling away into steam, or his flesh putrefying off his bones, or any of a hundred other sorcerous deaths Queen Anne had devised over her many lifetimes. But as it was, so bestially enraged was the Charnel King's bride that she lashed out physically, backhanding the orc like a common brawler, shrieking enough to shatter glass.
Of course, enraged or no, she remained a sorcerer.
Cræosh's abbreviated flight across the chamber was not markedly slower than a ballista bolt. Wood, glass, and shards of far less readily identifiable substances sprayed out from behind him as his body shattered one of the shelves along the outer wall. (Painful, certainly, but that shelf actually saved him from splattering like a rotting plum against said wall.) Gork couldn't help but wince at the sight of the mottled bruise already spreading across the orc's jaw. Cræosh slid to the floor and looked blearily upward; a thick trickle of blood slowly carried a fragment of tooth down his chin.
“Next time,” he wheezed at Gork, “you get to be the diversion.”
Given the queen's expression as she advanced on the crumpled orc, fists clenched and ribbons of eldritch energy streaming from her pupils and from the sigils inscribed across her body, Gork felt that the notion of “next time” was unduly optimistic. She was snarling something as she neared—perhaps ranting was more accurate—but damned if he could make out a word of it.
The hole in the floor erupted, vomiting a torrent of black, clacking vermin into the ceiling. They sprayed and spattered from the stone, falling in a twitching rain throughout the room. In the heart of that horrid fountain, a silhouette gradually took shape as though approaching from a vast, incomprehensible distance.
“About time,” Gork muttered, his heart pounding.
The power flowing from Queen Anne's body snuffed out like a candle. Her fists opened; her expression melted from uncontrollable rage to something near the very edge of despair—yet still tainted by a touch of the twisted lust that even now made Gork shudder just to contemplate it.
Hesitantly, she took a step toward the living
column. “My love—”
“Silence!”
Queen Anne dropped to her knees, as did half the squad. A skeletal hand reached out from the fountain of insects and parted the deluge, revealing the twisted, enraged visage—well, half a visage—of Morthûl.
“Your Majesty,” Fezeill said carefully, “we—”
“Out!” The Charnel King waved his flesh-covered hand at the door. The entire tower shook with the gesture, and hailstones of rock fell from the ceiling. The squad ran, Jhurpess stopping long enough to drag the battered orc to his feet.
Guess it was too much to hope he'd be left behind, Gork refrained—barely—from saying.
“Cræosh rest later!” the bugbear shouted into the swamp-green face. “Cræosh run now!” The two of them ducked through the doorway, hot on Gork's and Katim's heels. An enormous slab of stone slammed down beside the entryway, not quite blocking it; Fezeill shifted into a kobold between one step and the next and dove, his newly shrunken form slipping easily through the remaining gap.
Gork spun and looked back just in time to see Gimmol topple, clutching an ankle lacerated by rocky shrapnel. Only the kobold and the doppelganger were small enough to go back for him, and Gork, at least, had no intention of daring the rain of rock.
Nor was there any need; something enormous moved in the chamber behind the fallen gremlin. Belrotha gently lifted Gimmol from the floor, leaning forward to shield his body with her own, and tossed him underhanded toward the obscured doorway. Her throw was perfect, and the gremlin sailed through the gap just before another plummeting section of the ceiling sealed even that last tiny opening, totally and irrevocably burying the doorway.
“I've got him!” Katim shouted, snagging the gremlin out of the air before he could hurtle past them (and possibly over the edge of the stairwell). “Let's…go!” As though in emphasis, a trickle of dust sprinkled from above, scattering across the landing. Clearly, King Morthûl's fury was not confined to the laboratory.
“We can't!” Gimmol shouted, thrashing in the troll's grasp. “Belrotha's still in there! We have to—”
“Gimmol!” Katim shook the gremlin until his teeth chattered. “We can't get back in…there! We have to go!”
“No! I won't!”
Katim shook her head and then cracked Gimmol across the jaw with a closed fist. He stared at her incredulously for an instant, and then his eyes crossed and he fell limp. “Your loyalty becomes…you,” she whispered. Then she casually slung him over her shoulder like a sack of halflings.
Gork wasn't sure if any of the others had even heard the comment. He was pretty sure he wasn't intended to, and so made none of the various comments that sprang to mind.
The tower shook once again; the trickle of dust grew quickly into a flowing stream, and small rocks joined the downpour. The stairs creaked loudly, and several began to crack up the center.
“We'll never make it to the bottom in all this!” Fezeill shouted.
“We don't have to!” Gork said. “Follow me! I've got a plan!”
The tower shaking and buckling beneath them, the squad bounded down the stairs.
Belrotha hunkered down behind the largest of the slabs that had blocked the door and tried, for the first time in her life, to hide. She wasn't very successful at it.
Before her, in the room's center, Queen Anne knelt, staring up into the enraged face of her lord and love. Several times she opened her mouth to speak, and each time, as though deliberately interrupting, the tower trembled.
And then, for just a moment, the quaking ceased. “Did you think to supplant me?” Morthûl asked finally, and even Belrotha was stunned at the change in his tone. No more fury, no rage, no indignation; just cold curiosity, a weariness beyond all mortal comprehension—and maybe, just maybe, the slightest echo of what, in a past life, could have been pain. “Was it not enough to share my throne? You had to have it for yourself?”
“My lord, no!” Tears glistened in twin trails down the queen's face. Tears! From Queen Anne? “I wanted no such thing! I wished only to rule beside you, forever, as we were meant to be! I thought—”
“You thought what, Anne? That I would welcome this?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Now, of all times…With the failure of your great spell, and the coming war. I thought—”
“Not now. Not ever. Why do you think I never offered you this spell on my own? This was the one possibility, above all, that I wished to avoid”
Slowly, even gently, the master of the Iron Keep knelt and placed his hands on either side of his wife's face. Her eyes closed at his touch, and she moaned softly. “For now, you wish to sit beside me, my queen. But in time, it wouldn't be enough. I know, Anne. More than anyone can ever understand, I know. And be it now, or tomorrow, or centuries hence, I cannot let it be.
“There is power in this form, my queen. Power, perhaps, to rival the gods.” The flesh covering half the Charnel King's face tightened almost imperceptibly. Anne's eyes opened abruptly, perhaps in sudden realization of what must come next. “But the thing about being a god, Anne, is that you are only safe—if you're the only one.”
There was no sorcery involved, no spells, no magic. Morthûl simply tightened his grip, and twisted. The snap that reverberated throughout the laboratory was not merely the breaking of Queen Anne's neck, but of the Charnel King's last ties to the humanity he'd abandoned long ago.
Carefully, so carefully—as though, absurd as it seemed, he were afraid of injuring her—he lowered Queen Anne's head to the floor. He even took a moment to reach out with his leathery hand to close her staring eyes. Then, with a sound that might have been a sigh, he rose.
“Did you get all that, ogre?” he asked, his voice flat.
Belrotha emerged from behind the stone slab, clenched fingers digging into her palms to keep them from trembling. “Me see and hear,” she admitted nervously, “but me not understand.”
“Really?” Even as he spoke, Morthûl casually stepped across uneven heaps of broken stone to stand beside the vivisection table—or rather, where the table had been before being crushed to powder. He stopped for a brief examination of the rubble; then, apparently having learned whatever it was he needed, he turned back to the ogre. Behind his flapping cloak, Belrotha caught the tiniest glimpse of a crushed and mangled foot protruding from the stone. “And what didn't you understand?”
Belrotha, dense as she was, knew that she was treading on very dangerous ground here, but she wasn't about to ignore his question. “Why you kill Queen Anne?”
The Dark Lord's half-lips frowned. “Did you not hear what I told her?”
Belrotha took another deep breath. “Me rule Itho for two seasons. Me know what it mean to rule, to have power. Even though me not have as much power as you,” she added in a rush. “But me not think Queen Anne could hurt you. You too strong, rule too well.”
For a long moment, Morthûl stared. And then he laughed.
It was not the maniacal laugh of a mad tyrant, nor the cruel chuckle of a sadist, but a true, honest-to-gods guffaw, the laughter of a man who has finally gotten the joke.
“You,” he said once his mirth had run its course, “are not nearly as stupid as you're supposed to be.”
Belrotha wasn't quite certain how to take that. “Me can try harder,” she offered tentatively.
“No, I think this will do just fine.” The last of the grin faded from the Charnel King's face. “You're absolutely right, ogre. Queen Anne was no more threat to me than a newborn ogre would be to you. Oh, she could well have grown to be my equal, someday, but only if I chose to allow it.”
“Then…?” It had been hard enough to ask the first time, and Belrotha couldn't quite seem to spit it out again.
“Why kill her?”
The ogre nodded.
Morthûl frowned slightly. “I could tell you that it was for disobeying me,” he said. “But I doubt you'd believe that any more than you believed the first. I could tell you it was for distracting me at this crucial tim
e, but even you must realize that she could have proved quite useful in what's to come.” He glanced sidelong at her. “I could simply kill you for having the presumption to question me….”
Belrotha could no longer control her trembling.
“But that would be wasteful, and at the moment, the idea of further waste rather repulses me.” The empty socket gaped hideously, its yellow glow nauseating. But there was something in the cracked and dried orb that sat beside it, and the ogre's jaw gaped as she recognized it as sorrow.
“Why did I murder my queen? Because this,” and he gestured toward himself, two bony fingers pointing at a desiccated chest, “doesn't feel. I anger, I hate. I even, on rare occasion, rejoice. But it is only a shadow of what was, the dying echo of a long-forgotten song. For me, such sacrifice was more than worth it.
“But for Anne…My queen was a woman of passions, ogre. Perverse ones, perhaps; some of her more exotic aberrations appalled me, and that takes some doing. But whatever else her urges might have been, they were intense. They were the center of her world, of who she was. Had she truly understood what she must surrender, she would never have sought this out. And had she achieved it, it would have destroyed her.”
Morthûl stepped back and once more knelt beside the body, gazing for one last moment on the woman who had shared his throne for six hundred years. “This was my final gift to her, though it was one she would never have understood. A last gesture.” He gently took one of her hands in his own. “The final refrain of that forgotten song.”
He rose again, and as though that were some prearranged signal, the tower again began to quake. “Come, ogre,” he said, his voice once more arrogant, imperious. Empty. “Before you join my wife and your little sergeant as permanent residents.”
Like a dissipating wisp of smoke, the Dark Lord vanished, taking the ogre with him. Now empty of the living, the room shuddered once, twice—and collapsed in on itself, beginning an avalanche of stone that would eventually consume the entire tower. Ton upon ton of stone crashed down, burying the tiny, broken corpse of a demon; the body of a woman who was perhaps the most twisted of any to have walked beneath the sun…
