by Daryl Banner
“It is not lost! I will not—Excuse me—Excuse me!” she cries. The two guards at Janlord’s side have abandoned him, tearing down the hall with their weapons clattering at their hips.
“Help me,” Janlord breathes, a boy converted, eyes wetted with terror. “Help me see the truth in this, Attie … Please, my sweet Queen of Truths. Help me see.”
Queen Atricia’s eyes turn cold. “Help yourself.”
By her limp and careless hand, the chamber door shuts and locks with a disquieting finality not unlike a Queen’s sentencing. The bodyguard Tauron is stationed silently by the bed, his dark glare affixed to Chole.
“So be it,” she sings, sanity unraveling by the second. She can hear it in her own voice and does not care. “So be it that the dirty boys and girls stain themselves with their own blood. So be it that they eat their own fingers, for all their lust and greed, greed, greed!” She glares at the sunlight now cutting through her room, an unwelcome visitor. Oh, if it could only be the moonlight to comfort me, my friend. “When they’ve finished their meal of my throne, there will be nothing left.” Her voice turns sad. She can’t let them win, even if they do. She must be strong, but … “The Lifted City will fall,” she says and realizes at the same time.
“They come, my lady,” grunts the one called Tauron, an animal in the room, a pet.
Atricia just laughs. What else is there to do? “Let them come.” She moves toward her bedside to help herself to a final glass of brew, then suddenly finds herself stopped—the bodyguard has gripped her arm. She rolls her eyes onto him, a scowl finding her mouth. “You may defend my life, you ugly brute, but you will defend it when I’ve a glass in my hand.”
“I don’t mean to defend it,” he explains curtly. “I mean to take it.”
She stares at him, uncomprehending.
Then the whole world shudders and she drops to the floor in an instant. Her weight has increased a hundredfold, no warning or explanation, gravity pulling her to the hard and unrelenting tile. Her knees and thighs throb from the impact, head screaming worse, her left elbow—so many places hurt all at once, she doesn’t know what to pay attention to. Chole shouts out for her, but is silenced as quickly, collapsing to the floor with a grunt, some invisible power pressing him down. The Queen tries to shout, but even her lungs are heavy … For all the sudden strain on her body, she can’t even seem to lift her head.
But the bodyguard still stands, expressionless, unmoved.
“You,” he mutters in such a deep and twisted tone it isn’t human, “are Queen no longer. For slum rats, they sure pay handsomely.” He grins, his teeth a ghostly white, his eyes like murky pools. “They paid me to off the Queen and ready the throne for their arrival, dust it off, a swat here, a brush-brush there. I’m good with a blade, yes, built as a gargoyle, but you never had question of my Legacy. My Legacy is in gravity, as I can make a person heavy as I wish. So poetic, isn’t it? The Queen, made cumbersome with her own weight. The Ego Queen, fat with her own self-flattery, her vanity, her diamonds … And the boy she beds, the slum plaything, so heavy with his own evils that my Legacy hardly stretches a finger to pull him to the floor.” He runs a finger down the Queen’s neck, lets it slip over her breast, lets it run to her navel. “Where does a knife live, when not in its sheath?”
“S-S-S-Stop,” she manages to say, even the weight of her own lungs too agonizing a burden to bear. “S-S-S-Stop this.”
The man-thing plunges his long knife deep into her abdomen, his smile vanished. She feels nothing but a pinch, the crushing weight of gravity robbing her even of the feel of a blade in her belly … One might almost call it mercy, how the weapon makes no screams of her.
“And once your eyes rock back,” he explains, his voice the slickness of the running blood down her side, “this same knife will meet the throat of your slum plaything over there. He put his mouth all over you, Lust Queen, I know all your misbehaviors of last night. He betrays his own kind, his brethren storming up the stairs of the Tower right now. They will know him for the fraud he is, and I will be their hero … Killed the both of you, I have, you and your slum plaything lover. Maybe I will be King …”
Atricia’s hand, flattened against the floor, it is but inches away from Chole’s. She cannot reach it, and neither can he reach her … Both of them held to the ground by otherworldly weight, prisoners to an unseeable force.
“King Of Brutes,” he sings, the song sounding a perversion in his twisted voice. “The Retribution King … That has quite the ring, doesn’t it?”
“Y-Y-You won’t be K-King,” she breathes, an unexpected calmness finding her. The words are but whispers, yet heard perfectly. “B-B-Because the wind … the wind outside m-m-my balcony … it sings to you a q-q-question.” She focuses. The world is turning a blur, but she focuses until she’s sure her eyes are bursting, until she’s near to rupturing every vein in her expiring body, popping herself to pieces like the glass on her floor. “Answer, Brute K-King … Answer the wind.”
The man-thing appears confused, even with the smoke of murder still playing on his face. Then with no commitment at all, with the voice of a sleepy child, he mumbles, “Yes, yes … Don’t think I’m … Don’t think I’m through with you, Lust Queen.” Suddenly she is free … gravity’s heavy hands gone. Letting go the hilt of his kill-toy—still plunged in her belly—he crosses to the balcony. The Queen twists her head, watches as her bodyguard heeds her order this one last time, facing the music of morning gales. Lifting himself to the rail of the balcony, the wind singing, singing, he answers its call with a leap of faith.
She doesn’t hear him land.
The face of Chole appears, blurring in and out. “Atricia … Atricia, stay with me. Please, please …” The world blinks, blinks, in and out.
“Chole, listen to … listen to me.” She realizes she’s holding the handle of the blade. She feels nothing … from the stab, from the blood, from slamming against the floor, nothing …
A crash of thunder. Arrived, the rebels are trying to break through the chamber door, trying to break into the room. Another crash, another.
“Chole,” she begs, whimpers, reeling her eyes, searching for him in the mad haze that’s become her world … searching for his beautiful face. “Tell them you’ve done it … T-Tell them y-you’ve succeeded and—and you’ll be theirs. Chole …”
“Succeeded? Succeeded in what??” He’s shaking, a boy who’s lost his courage. Please, please, don’t make this count for nothing. Let me this one thing, please, let me this one good thing before I—
“K-Killing me.”
The words fall from her mouth so easy, one would think she’d planned it from the beginning.
“No,” he scoffs, dismissive, nearly laughing out the word through his nose than his mouth. He’s gone mad, mad as her, mad as the fuzzy world. “No, I won’t say that, I didn’t kill you. Please …”
“I c-c-could make you do it.” She grabs his hands—a wonder she is able to find them through the haze. She thinks she sees his black eyes bleeding. He’s trying to pull his hand away, overcome and emotional by her train of logic, but she won’t let go. She might leave a bruise; at least something of love will be left behind other than the ruin of a city she’s made. “You know I c-c-can do it … I can make you tell them you k-killed me, make you their hero. You deserve it.”
“I’m no hero.”
“Chole,” she rasps, her voice nothing pretty, “The Dust K-King … Has a r-r-ring to it.”
She may never know whether it is her Legacy that convinces him, or if on his own accord he finds rightness in her words. Even with a fog of numbness settling inside her, she wonders if, for the first time, she indeed invoked a person to see the Truth.
I see the dust queen you made me.
The door bursts open—she hears it, her world too far a blur to make anything but colors and shapes—and the rebels pour in. There is shouting and anger in one moment, then the silence of winds the next. Such a gentle breeze … Atrici
a wonders, considering how peaceful it is. She did not expect to find peace when the rebels came upon her.
“Chole … heir to the throne.” Even now, she can’t be sure if these are words she thinks, or words she speaks. “Chole … King Of Ashes.”
And for the first time in her little life, she herself sees the Queen’s Truth. Chole and his victory … the rebels won over by his duty. Chole and the throne, the people protecting his honor the way a mother protects a child, pure and true. Oh, the cheers, the celebration … I see it. Janlord, kind and wise, he’s surrendered and spared his necessary life, his wisdom taken with due importance and weight, revered as it ought to be. You were always good and kind … Too kind. That kindness will be Chole’s weakness too. Please, protect him if you can … Chole will work to unite the cities of sky and earth, Lifted and slum, a good and proud King, but for how long will a hard city hold against a soft heart?
“I’ve done it,” says a voice so far away, a voice like home.
Oh, she still grips his arm … his heat still close enough to be felt. Or has she let go? They are asking questions now, she hears it … Chole speaking, his voice a song, an innocence, just as she always remembered.
And in a world where no one sleeps, Queen Atricia closes her eyes and never again opens them.
The dwelling in a fourth ward slum of her memory washes forth to take her home. It is a memory she thought was gone, a day in the slums kissed by sunlight, her friend again. Cool summer winds playing in her hair, there is a boy in her yard, a boy with hair of night. His eyes catch hers, he smiles with big proud lips and says: “See the dust queen I made you? See how she dances?”
Little Atricia laughs, reaches out to claim the queen and take her dance. She reaches and reaches, forever reaching.
An afterword from the author
Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the tragic but necessary tale of Atricia Sunsong and her fall from the throne of Atlas. They crowned her childhood friend and love Chole Everon as King of Atlas, The Dust King. Sadly, his rule was short. Only two years later, Sanctum forces eradicated “the slummers” from Cloud Keep, and Chole’s life, as well as all that the uprising had fought and died for, came to an abrupt end.
But the precedent has now been set, and the slums will not be so easily quieted.
The Slum Queen is a prequel to the epic urban fantasy/dystopian Outlier novels. The first in the series, Outlier: Rebellion, takes place 37 years after the events of The Slum Queen.
Continue the epic saga in Outlier: Rebellion, and join the Lesser family of the ninth ward slums as they come upon the heels of the next uprising.
Outlier: Rebellion (Book 1) is available on Amazon:
http://www.amzn.com/B00M1XUK7W
Table of Contents
Kings & Queens of Atlas
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TheSlumQueen
The Slum Queen
The Good Queen
Queen Of Truths
Queen Of Wishes
Atricia
