Sister Sable (The Mad Queen Book 1)

by T. Mountebank

  Girard questioned what she heard. “This protection of the King is not part of the revelation preached to the public.”

  “No?” This visibly troubled her.

  “What exactly was said? Who told you to protect the King?”

  Sable looked away.

  Girard sighed. A practiced interrogator, she empathized, “Dividing loyalties, it’s a hard business. Imagine what form the threat will take. What are you defending against?”

  Sable’s eyes went further away. “You are not going to understand this, there is so much you cannot understand, but there is something out there.” They could not have guessed she was looking at it. “It is so great I cannot predict the distance, but I see it. It is …” she tried to find the words to describe it and startled them with, “it is all blood and guts and Cloitare. It would rip through here and obliterate everything if it were not being held in place by my resolve.” She came back to the company in the room, her expression once again inscrutable Cloitare. “My resolve is not to marry the King.” She stood to leave, telling Remy, “It is the only way I know to protect you.”

  He had not tried to make her stay. Regret gnawed at him when she failed to show for dinner the next week. The Cloitare sent apologies, explaining Sister Sable was ill. The next week more apologies, Sable had been sent to another convent for meditations. That night, Berringer was ordered to seal off the Cloitare’s western wing, to surround the windowless ground floor and guard against communication through the stone lattice vents of the upper levels. He was to block passage through the double doors, refusing all clergy entrance or exit until the Bound Bride was produced. The King would hear absolutely no council on the wisdom of his order.

  Berringer was still a colonel at the time, and it was only their friendship that excused his omission. “Remy,” he bowed with deep regret, “my King, forgive me, I watched the Bride run away.”

  ~~~~~~

  The King of Erentrude stood in the salt flats where Berringer had found him, his head bent to the lithium report in his hand, bracing himself for the return of the Cloitare’s attention. While the public believed the Bound Bride was away in meditation, the years had been calm, as near to normal as anything he knew. On occasion, violent expectations had set the streets ablaze when any one of the conspiracies that thrived in the imagination of the faithful took special root, but then Master Aidan would emerge and call for peace. The Master and Mentor alone, he would remind them with his voice full of terrible authority, had been appointed by divinity to pick the timing of the union between the King and Queen Mother.

  Remy would mourn the tranquility. He gazed over the blinding white lithium field with desire. It ran wide and flat until it abutted the barely visible mountains that encircled it. He knew every facet of it, had spent years on it, breathing its scent deep into his lungs, savoring it, listening to the low whirl of pumps that sucked the brine from just below the surface, filtering it, refining it, and sending it out to power the world. It calmed him and he would miss it.

  The King turned to the General and signaled they were leaving.

  1:30 p.m.

  The King’s intelligence chief had already begun to work furiously against his general. The General’s jet would be directed to the smaller airport. There would be livestock—god knows how she would arrange it—but there would be animals on the runway forcing them to circle. The vehicles Berringer arranged to meet the Cloitare would not arrive, and mechanics were already preparing the substitute transport to break down. When they found another way to travel, she would have them directed to the wrong hospital, even if she had to build one from smoke.

  Girard did not have time now to talk to the King, but she had been summoned.

  ~~~~~~

  They assembled as they often did in the King’s private sitting room.

  “What do we know?”

  Berringer had been in sporadic contact with Major Dominic on the return ride to the palace with the King and had passed along information as it came. The military jet with the Cloitare had entered Alena’s airspace two hours previous, and they were three hours from landing at Eudokia Field.

  The political secretary, Laudin, could contribute little to the search for the nun. “The Alenan government has given me assurances they are at our service in the search for your young cousin, Francis, who was believed to be traveling disguised on the train.”

  The King frowned at Girard with familiar disbelief.

  She opened her hands in appeasement. “It was the best explanation for our involvement I could imagine with no time to conceive it.”

  Remy waved it away. “What else are you doing?” He knew of all the people gathered, she would make herself the busiest.

  “The station chief in Alena has sent people to the wreck to locate and confirm it is her. I don’t want the Cloitare slipping us a new bride under the bright lights of this sideshow. The Prime Minister’s doctor is one of mine. He’s traveling to the hospital in Eudokia to represent the government. He’s ready to step in and do whatever is required when she’s found.”

  Remy sliced his hand through the air and cut her off angrily. “All that will be required of him is to keep her alive. Do you understand?”

  “Of course,” she deferred. “The place is remote. Utterly inconsequential. My people will only be arriving now.” She glanced at the door.

  He would not be hurried. “Catherine, I will be very clear: No one is to hurt her.”

  Again Girard bowed her head and appeared to agree.

  “When you have time, I want to hear all the scenarios we are facing. What to expect if she’s dead, if she’s alive, crippled, returned tomorrow, next year. I want you back here as soon as you feel comfortable leaving your people running their operations alone.”

  2 p.m.

  “What in fuck’s name is she doing out here?” Nika wanted to know.

  Enzo checked his messages again. Still nothing. “It’s not like she’s going to tell us when we get there.”

  The small plane had left Erentrude’s border hours ago. It had flown outside Alena’s capital city, Helena, following at times the train tracks to Balina and then out again toward Eudokia. It floated near silent over perfect, square fields with the battery at a quarter charge. Enzo had thrown in half a dozen more in case the situation saw them fleeing across the border into Sierra. And because it was Marlow that had asked for help, he threw in pepper spray, gas masks, rubber bullets, hollow points, armor piercing, and if he’d had grenades, he’d have taken those too. “Hell only knows what she’s done.”

  “It’s Radimir.” Nika hated the weapons dealer with every black-dyed hair on her otherwise blond head. “I told her not to fuck with him. He’s got a sick fetish.” The plane’s throttle could not be pushed any farther, so Nika kept her heavy boots on the pedals, adjusting to use the tailwind for speed. Hours before, she’d explained it to Enzo, “Marlow was on her way to meet him yesterday when she got a text and dropped everything to deal with it. She said Radimir could wait. And you know he can’t. She said she’d persuade him to forgive her later. Fuck knows how that was supposed to happen.”

  Now Enzo reread Marlow’s message while Nika laid the blame on him. “I don’t know how you thought introducing the two of them wasn’t going to end in anything except bullets and mayhem.”

  “It’s not Radimir.” Enzo closed the phone. “She was worried about losing her freedom, not her life.” He looked out the window at endless farms. Born in Erentrude’s capital, the scene could not be more unfamiliar, the grueling work completely incomprehensible to him. Why they didn’t all flee over the border to the motherland left him confounded. He could not imagine life without delivered food, and he laughed to picture any of them over a stove. The place they lived didn’t even have a kitchen. But beneath them, he was certain those people cooked, eating things they had dug from the soil. The image of someone taking a shovel to the dirt to make a meal made him uncomfortable. It was all too far removed from what he understood to feel
secure. “I don’t get what she’s doing on a train anyway. I gave her new batteries two days ago. Why didn’t she fly? What in terrifying hell is out here?”

  Nika shared the stress. Marlow didn’t ask for help; Marlow gave help. Marlow asked for information. She asked for all your contacts and your cousin’s contacts too. She asked for drugs and she asked for weapons and she was not above stealing your tech, but she had never asked for help.

  3 p.m.

  Aidan held her in his mind. He held her asleep and he searched the distance. It was in the distance he saw the three men. He would not get to her before they did. He held her and he waited.

  4 p.m.

  The airport’s manager had been called by the sheriff and asked to attend the airfield as a very important jet was coming in. The manager said, “Well, it better be a damn small jet, we’re only five hundred meters long.”

  The three men Aidan found in the distance would have landed at Eudokia Field twenty minutes before Major Dominic’s pilots, but there was livestock everywhere. Hands shielding their eyes to the sun, they just made out cattle and geese dotting from one end of the tarmac to the other.

  As the three passed over the airstrip, they saw a man flapping his arms at the animals, herding them back toward an overturned trailer that had crashed through the fence.

  They climbed back into the sky and returned to the fields and the road on the outside of town. Their plane was light enough to carry only a single battery and a spare, allowing them to set down nearly anywhere straight and flat.

  Aidan was with them, a silent presence that bothered their thoughts.

  The pilot, normally so sure of himself, could not pick a place to land. He worried the fields were too wet, that the weight of the passengers would dig the wheels into the mud and flip the plane. “I need to find a stretch of straight highway,” he said.

  The two men with him kept insisting it was below them. “There, for god’s sake, what is wrong with that?”

  “It’s not long enough.”

  “Fuck’s sake, Carl, it runs from here to your mother’s cunt. Put this bitch down.”

  “Seriously, dude, just turn around and land on that stretch behind us.”

  “The wind is wrong,” Carl explained.

  “Fucking wind, is it? The only wind is coming out of your mouth. Turn the fuck around and land.”

  “Dude. Seriously. Turn around and land.”

  “There. I’ll set us down there.”

  “And what? We fucking walk to town? Do you see a car out here? We gonna putter this bitch into town for all to see? Like a fucking parade? Is that it?”

  “Seriously, you’ve got to turn around and land us back there.”

  Without further warning, the passenger slugged the pilot in the arm. “Turn the fuck around.” And then, to ensure compliance, he twisted Carl’s ear.

  “Alright, alright.” Flinching away from the aggression, the pilot began the turn. “Have it your way. If we die, you can blame yourself.” He couldn’t place it, but he had a feeling something was terribly wrong. He checked and doubled checked the ailerons, the rudder, the stabilizer. Anxiety welled in his chest, quickening his breath. It was the landing gear, but no, the wheels came down and locked. Squinting into the sun to see the road, altitude dropping, the pilot set the flaps to full to give them lift.

  Aidan was there, waiting for his moment.

  With the asphalt rising fast beneath them, Carl began to pull back on the yoke.

  The Master and Mentor dropped his hold on Sable and punched hard into the pilot.

  Carl knew flaming pain from the sun as his pupils dilated wide and the road undulated, flashing back ripples of light. His terror was heard by the passengers as a horrific realization, “It’s a river.”

  Panicking without thought, he gave full throttle and pulled sharply up, lifting the nose over the sun and into the cloudless sky. Seized with an absolute conviction he was about to drown, the pilot pulled further back on the yoke. Arms locked with adrenaline wanting to surface from the depths of limitless water, he tilted the plane near vertical until they felt the first sickening pull back to ground as the plane stalled. Carl mistook it for sinking and would not release the yoke. He was still pulling up when wind caught in the flaps and flipped the single-battery plane end over front, collapsing it on its back on the asphalt. Then it was quiet.

  Carl’s eyes adjusted. Beside him one man rolled to his knees, but behind him, the other had a plastic rod running through his chest. The unfortunate passenger was shaking his head at the pilot in disgust. “Seriously, dude, you suck.”

  Now they were two.

  4:10 p.m.

  Sable opened her eyes to rows of old fluorescent fittings hardwired to homemade mercury bulbs. She followed the crude design down the long hall. She lay on the floor in a row of bodies, some curled in pain, others still. The arm of her coat had been purposefully cut to expose the vein from which a needle was taped. Bags of saline and blood had been clothes-lined down the hall on rope.

  She had enough time to take it in before Aidan was back, pulling her under. She rolled to push herself up but gasped as the flesh split at her hip. In the shock, Aidan brought her back to the floor, but she was struggling against it, mumbling curses that brought an old man with a nurse’s top to her side.

  “Baby girl, ain’t no need for pain, not when I got the anodyne.”

  It raced up the vein, searing like fire at her throat and then rushed into her brain, knocking her firmly down and making her swear, “Motherfucker.”

  “Now, I’m going to forgive you for calling me that,” he chided. “I ain’t never thought of my mother that way. Those doctors will get to you soon. You be a good girl and I’ll keep you in anodyne’s sunny shine for hours.”

  4:15 p.m.

  The two left the plane on the road and stole the first car that was forced to stop.

  “Fucking fresh shit this is.”

  The pilot sat in the passenger seat feeling angst wrap tight around his heart. Palms wet with sweat, he wanted to rock himself like a mental patient but didn’t dare. “I told you we couldn’t land with that wind.”

  “Wind again? You gonna stick with that wind bullshit?” The driver kept one eye on the road, one hand on the wheel, and flipped through pages on his phone. “They’re taking everyone to the hospital. Place is called Hospital. Fucking Alenans.”

  4:20 p.m.

  Major Dominic was telling Berringer, “There are no vehicles here.”

  The General spoke on two lines, “The sheriff says his men are sitting at the airport but don’t see you.”

  “No, sir. There are no vehicles here. Eudokia Field?”

  Berringer asked the sheriff, “Eudokia Field?” and then answered Dominic, “Sheriff says they are at Eudokia Field.”

  Major Dominic signaled his men to circle the airfield on foot again.

  “Got a lot of cows here,” one told Dominic, “but there are no running vehicles. The manager can’t even get his started.”

  Dominic told Berringer, “They are not here.”

  Berringer now knew beyond doubt he was fighting Girard. She had not backed down at the King’s command.

  The sheriff came on smooth, “Well, General, you’re just going to hang me, but those boys aren’t at Eudokia Field after all. They drove all the way out to Balina. Don’t you worry though, I got all the boys’ wives coming out there to get you now.”

  Berringer was of two minds: one was loyal to Remy, one to the King. He paced three quick steps one way and two back. “Dominic, the sheriff is sending the deputies’ wives with transport. You do not get in those cars with those women. Under no circumstances or misconceptions do you allow anyone in those cars. Have you got traffic on the road in front of you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Jack them.”

  4:30 p.m.

  There was no hospital. The driver circled the grocery store the map indicated as Hospital.

  “Fucking hell.” He glared at
the pilot. “Where is the fucking hospital?”

  Carl rose above his distress to remember he’d been told where to go. “I was supposed to be driving.”

  The driver rolled his tongue across his teeth and leaned his head sideways to the idiot at his side. “Did we forget something?”

  “West, go west.”

  4:40 p.m.

  It appeared like a wedding reception. Huge white tents with bunting sewn into the hems were spread across the lawn of the hospital. On the tips of the support poles, flags had been permanently attached which waved merrily in the breeze. “Wind,” the pilot pointed out.

  Through clinched teeth, the driver chewed the warning, “One more fucking word about wind …”

  Old gas generators chugged in the parking lot with lines snaking off into the building and tents. The improvised shelters glowed radiant with light, casting dark images of the grim activity within.

  The hospital’s two ambulances rested with the doors open and victims on the stretchers. Most of the survivors had been loaded into cars that had been traveling on the highway. Occupants of the passing vehicles had crawled through the wreckage, pulling out the living, packing them into transport in the order they appeared. The largest among them had turned their cars over to strangers while they grappled with twisted metal. “Drive, just drive,” they’d been told.

  The anarchic conveyance of the wounded complete, the parking lot laid full, but still.

  “Everyone that’s coming to this party is here,” the driver said.