Sister Sable (The Mad Queen Book 1)

by T. Mountebank

  Nika tried sounding it out again. “Two words, the first starting with mmm.”

  In unison, Enzo and Max offered, “Motherfucker.”

  “What I want answered, more than what she said, is what in holy terrifying hell the army and the Cloitare were doing palled up there.” Enzo had demanded it before. “Sure the army went there to get the King’s cousin—”

  “That diamond-clad high-heeled bitch was not on a coal train.” Nika dropped the headphones to rest around her neck.

  “I can’t see it—she’d be one hell of a freak I’d like to meet if she were—but fuck it, sure, she was on the train. It at least makes some sort of sense.” Enzo’s voice dropped to quiet disbelief, “Until you throw in all those nuns.”

  It had all been said before and Nika didn’t want to repeat it again. She turned away to watch the flat screen on the wall as the Bound Bride, just returned from years of meditation, was presented to the King. The nun led a wide procession of Cloitare across the open courtyard before the palace, taking the whole black mass up to the waiting king.

  Nika imagined when the show was over and the media started dissecting the footage, the straight backed king was going to be shown with an angry face for the humiliation he was about to suffer. But then, unexpected, the Bound Bride, having stopped just close enough to touch him, dropped seamlessly to her knees. The company behind her shifted. The Master and Mentor went down behind her almost immediately, but the black sea at their back wavered and rolled before falling in uncertain increments before the King.

  “This shit right here is why the rest of the world calls us fucking knee benders.” Enzo was scornful of the display.

  “Well, isn’t that something.” Max watched the screen. “I thought His Royal Remy was supposed to keel over before her.”

  “Fuck them. Fuck them both. And the cousin. They took Marlow. She did something awful and they took her.” Nika glared at the image of the Cloitare laid low before the King.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “If they didn’t take her, where is she?”

  Max was skeptical of anything that stepped too close to conspiracy. The network was full of the wildest explanations. “What could the army, much less the fucking clergy, possibly want with Marlow?”

  Enzo tapped her still encrypted drive. “You need to speed this up and tell us.”

  ~~~~~~

  It was almost a pity the live presentation in the courtyard had proceeded as it had. The three advisors were anticipating the confrontation of power as the King refused to bow to the Cloitare. It was going to be their defining moment, a reversal of previous deference, a defiant demonstration to all of Erria that the King was on equal footing with the Cloitare and would concede no further. But then Sable had sunk to her knees and remained stubbornly low until the whole of the assembled clergy were forced to follow or appear in conflict.

  It left Girard with an unfocused aggression in her chest for a battle denied. Assembled in the King’s private rooms, she could not wait to speak. “Quite a convincing act of loyalty. I expect you want something for it.”

  Sable pulled the corner of her lips slowly up. “Perhaps.” She lingered on the spymaster with vicious humor, turning the exchange into a psychotic contest until Girard looked away. “Surely seeing all those black robes shake in outrage is worth at least a thank you.” Then her demeanor became solemn and she turned to the King. “But it was not an act.”

  Remy had once again expelled all but one Cloitare from the room. He stood in front of his desk, facing the lone nun. His face silently challenged her statement.

  “Would you like me to kneel again to prove myself?”

  He remained speechless. When she went down, he was both shocked and annoyed. “I did not expect you to. Get up.”

  She rose, saying, “I have always been loyal to you.”

  Girard’s voice was filled with false sweetness. “Loyalties still dividing? Or have they split?”

  Sable directed her answer to the King. “I have never betrayed you.”

  Remy was aware she did not turn Cloitare eyes on him. She allowed him to hold her gaze and study her. “Where have you been?”

  “Within your lands and out. Among your people and mine: the royalists, the rebels, the pious, the fanatical, and the indifferent. I have been many places. Too many to name.”

  Laudin asked from behind, “Did anyone recognize you?”

  “No. Never.”

  The King rested back on his desk and motioned for the three advisors to sit. Sable he kept before him. He leaned forward and took her hand, pulling her toward him as he pushed back the sleeve of her robe to reveal the shackle. Anger and disbelief played across his features. “I had been told, but seeing it …” She seemed calm though. “Have they hurt you?”

  Comfort showed in her smile. “There was never a need. Only Master Aidan has the control and he is not cruel.” Flipping her hand to hold his, she said, “I must ask you to help me. Help me escape.”

  Behind her, the three advisors sat rigid with hopeful expectation, but Remy frowned.

  She did not wait for him to refuse. “You are safe as long as I hold my resolve not to wed, but anyone can be broken.” She glanced back to Berringer. “Can they not?”

  His head dipped in brusque agreement.

  “My King, the Cloitare will harm you if we marry; the people will destroy you if you refuse. As long as you present a willing face to unite but the mothers do not present me, you are safe. The clergy will be held responsible for the failure. But they will break me. I will agree for reasons my mind will invent to save itself. And then you will die. I am certain of it. With me as queen, they will kill you and your lands will be ruled by a council of regents from the Cloitare.”

  The conviction of her words stifled the room.

  “This is the time to help me. Give me what I require to hack this unfair bangle off my wrist. I cannot fight them with it on.” She took his other hand. “Please agree.”

  Remy’s expression was harsh. “It is a foul thing I would not have on you. Regardless of why you want it off, I want it off.” With a gesture, he gave Berringer and Girard permission to assist.

  Sable did not spare them her brutal face. “I need—” and without courtesy, she reached into Girard’s jacket pocket to pull out her phone. Setting it to record, she began a detailed list of equipment.

  Only Remy still recognized the girl that had feared for him so many years ago, feared for him enough to run away and change herself.

  ~~~~~~

  Lieutenant Fallon thought he had put the Cloitare behind him when Mission Retrieve was closed. He thought the transfer into General Berringer’s information security team would keep him well clear of the modernity eschewing clergy, but on entering the private hall, he encountered the nuns in force, dozens of them, crowded outside the King’s rooms. They turned on him, a great swath of hissing fabric, and saw clearly his intent. They knew him for what he was and what he carried, and they hated him.

  He clamped onto both shoulder bags and buried his head. Keep your head down, walk fast, head down, walk fast.

  The hall throbbed with focused intimidation. William Fallon heard his heart pounding in his head. He knew he wasn’t breathing, just running the gauntlet, head down, walking fast.

  When he got to the door, he fumbled with the knob and the weight of the bags. The nuns stepped forward in perfect unison, darkening his periphery. He pawed at the wood trying to knock, and again, hands wet with terror, unresponsive with adrenaline, he pulled and pushed at the door. The nuns moved closer, forcing the sound of wordless terror from his burning lungs.

  When the door opened from inside, the Lieutenant tripped forward, gasping for the air he had denied himself. He dropped the bags just steps inside and then hurried across the rug until he heard the door close. Thinking himself safe, he bent at the waist, hands on his knees, and heaved the fear from his lungs; then he saw the black hem of a nun swirl across his shoes and convulsed.


  “Shhhh.” Her hand laid on his shoulder. “They are such a ghastly lot, are they not?”

  It seemed to him that her mirthful empathy gave them a bond, and then it was all quite funny. “I hate when they do that,” he chuckled.

  He rose to Berringer’s disapproval, but Sable would have none of it. She linked her hand in his arm and walked him back to the bags. “I hope you packed to impress.”

  Within minutes, she ceased to be even distantly regal. She became instead one of the tech heads that gather at conventions and exude wonder over what they’ve seen, what they’ve made, and what they’re going to do with what they’ve learned. Across an ornately carved table, Sable and William became engrossed and ignored the room.

  Fallon pulled out a portable programmer, circuit boards, and encoders. Sable dug through the second bag, setting aside a variety of rare DC plugs and brittle cables cracked with age. “Nice, nice.”

  “Now this,” she thrust her hand with the shackle at him, and then turned it to expose a small opening, “has to be an old DC port, right? What else could it be?”

  Fallon turned her wrist over to inspect it. “That’s the only opening. How long have you had it on?”

  “A month.”

  “Have they tried to recharge it through the port? Or would they even know how?”

  “No one’s touched it.”

  “Think it’s been updated?”

  “I imagine it was pulled out of a vault. Why take time to update anything more than the battery?”

  “Where does it get its signal to, uh, you know …” Fallon grimaced, “… activate?”

  “Remote. It’s a slide ball that can be carried discreetly in a pocket, but I don’t know the range. Other than to mold itself flush, the thing has been idle. We’re looking at fifty-year-old tech. They’d have to update to a modern battery, making the port superfluous. A modern bat would never need recharging, or god save the person who wore it. But, unless you can correct me, considering the age, the port should still give us access to—”

  “—the memory,” they both finished in agreement.

  While she’d been speaking, Fallon had been trying to get a wireless signal from it, but it was lifeless, transmitting nothing. “We’ll try to get the site code with my friend here, little Miss MayMay,” he patted a circuit board and resistor, “microcontroller for the malicious.”

  Sable picked it up and put it down with derision. “Wi Fry, unless you’ve got some jack-happy skills I’ve never heard of, that thing couldn’t open a hotel safe.”

  He covered the ears of Miss MayMay in mock offense, and then taunted Sable with dry confidence, “Catch up, analog.”

  Sable laughed.

  The four watching the interaction were uncomfortable with the familiarity passing at the table, but neither of the hackers was aware.

  “Expect it to be encrypted.”

  “I’ve got software for that.” He patted a laptop.

  “How long do you think? Minutes? Hours? Can we find an old algorithm for it?”

  Lieutenant Fallon sat back. “I’m searching for old codes now.” He tapped the laptop once more. “Considering its age, I’m thinking minutes, but I really can’t say until we see what it is.” He was already worried, so he spoke his greater concern. “What if it’s protected?”

  She looked at him confused.

  He frowned. “Of all the technologies for them to embrace.” He opened his hands to the shackle as if he couldn’t bring himself to say it. “I mean, it has a purpose. What if we set it off?”

  Sable sat upright and became a nun again. “Well then, I will scream and you will read the code.” She ignored the straightening of Remy’s back. To the General, she said, “Cover my mouth so the mothers do not hear.”

  “Stop.” The last part of the exchange had struck Remy sober. He came off the edge of the desk where he’d been watching. The room was paralyzed, waiting. To Sable he said, “I will not have this.”

  “We are only speaking of possibilities,” she spoke breezily to dispel concern.

  To Lieutenant Fallon, the King asked, “Is this risk likely?”

  Fallon was formal. “With respect, it must be considered. I apologize for my ignorance, but this is the first time I have seen a compliance shackle. No one from either of our generations,” his gesture circled the room, “would have any experience with one.”

  Thinking she was about to be denied, Sable became harsh. “People scream, die, and cry for you every day. This is nothing by comparison, and nothing to what happens if we don’t get it off.” Then she saw the tone of her abrupt dismissal was an insult to his apprehensions. She quickly remembered where she was. “Please, Remy,” she softened her voice, “Lieutenant Fallon is right. It does have a purpose, so far better to let me hurt myself than allow someone else.” And then to further dispel the offense she had caused, she bowed her head, “Please, my King, permit me this liberty.”

  He did not appear satisfied, but he opened his hand to signal they could continue. To Berringer, he said, “You will not muzzle her,” and then severely to Lieutenant Fallon, “You will stop at the first sign of distress.”

  Sable grabbed William’s hand and shook the strain out of him, smiling, encouraging, “This will be sunshine, Wi Fry, pure easy sunshine.”

  ~~~~~~

  Lieutenant Fallon didn’t know at first what was happening. He had only just put the barrel connector into the DC port when she went wide-eyed, pulled her manacled fist to her chest, and fell as a tight heap of black fabric to the floor.

  Berringer was the first to start shouting, “Off. Turn it off, Lieutenant.”

  The King’s voice roared over the General’s, “End it. Now.”

  He had already turned off the programmer when she added her own voice to the pandemonium, a muffled wail suppressed by her robes and posture. Fallon ripped the converter cable from the programmer, cracking its brittle insulation with the force, but it silenced no one. The King and General were still bellowing for him to stop. He reached into the ball she had made of herself and tried to get at the connector in the port, but she was locked into herself.

  Berringer forced his hands through her arms and brought her up, freeing her to shake the room with a full-throated, mind-rending scream she unleashed from the lungs. Fallon and the King winced low under the piercing gale to grapple with her hand for the plug. When Fallon touched the broken connector, he was sent backward yelping. He shook the current from his hand, smothered the flame in his shoulder, and coughed embers from his guts. Remy held on longer, twisting before her in a howling spasm before the flow of fire forced him to release. Fallon tried snapping it out by the cable, with her all the while shrieking, loud and hysterical, but the cable was disintegrating, crumbling apart with age, leaving shorter and shorter lengths.

  Then Aidan was among them, pushing between the three, a great black mass in robes, freeing the connector with a growl. There was shocking silence, abrupt but fleeting.

  The King exploded with unrestrained fury. “Remove it at once!” Reaching up, he pulled the Master and Mentor around by the shoulder.

  The General dropped the nun and stepped between the two, prepared to take Aidan down if he responded to Remy’s aggression.

  Forcing through, the King shoved at the wide chest of the Mentor, demanding again, “Take it off, or, by your gods, I will destroy you.”

  Girard, who had not come to her feet for the whole of the screaming debacle, backed her king now. “Devil be warned, you will do as he says.”

  The Master and Mentor took the abuse, allowed it to turn him around, knock him back, insult him. He said simply, “It is not my decision,” and looked to the open door where Mother Vesna had entered.

  Remy did not hear or did not care. He pushed past Berringer once more to order a third time, “At once, take it off.”

  Aidan stepped back and bowed. “Again, it is not my decision.”

  “You were not invited,” Laudin informed the Cloitare pushing into the roo
m.

  Frustrated by the lowered head of Aidan, Remy sought another.

  Mother Vesna stood in the fore, her attention sweeping over the details of the room: the nun on the floor, her mentor humbled, the King out of control. She judged the scene in the room poorly. Her arrogance focused the King.

  “You, woman,” he pointed at Vesna, “you have been the bane of my life and will be no longer. You will take the abomination from the hand of that girl or you will see the end of this elaborate fiction today.”

  Of all the things, Laudin did not want this exchange to escalate. He pushed at the group, yelling, “Every one of you out.” His voiced cracked in desperation. “Catherine, help me.”

  Girard flew at the mothers. “All of you,” and she ate the word whores, “start moving.”

  But Vesna would not be shifted. “If the King wishes to end our centuries of alliance in dishonor, then that is the will of the King and for the people to judge. Your future is your own, but will you so readily martyr your bride?”

  The King felt slapped. His voice lowered to a growl, “We will witness your death before hers.”

  Girard broke through the gathered nuns’ resistance, and together, she and Laudin pushed them out, cursing them like cattle, loud and crass to drown out anything Remy could threaten or Vesna return.

  On the floor, unaware of the fray, Sable crawled toward Lieutenant Fallon. “Wi Fry,” she rasped, “we gotta ground that motherfucker.”

  Aidan pulled her up. “Not today, anawa. Today we return to the convent.”

  Politics

  The political secretary could not shake the feeling that the whole palace had become cursed since the return of the Bound Bride. The place had never been particularly vibrant, as though something in the old stone walls, with their ancient display of weapons and deep colored tapestries, forbid levity, but of late it seemed a malign entity ruled the halls. Places that had been quiet heaved with grief. Laudin had gone to the billiard room to change his own bleak scenery and found the staid housekeeper sobbing into the back of a chair. Tears he heard behind many closed doors. The rooms of Berringer, normally so lively with his wife’s tempestuous need to ensure her husband’s passion, sounded dull and boring. Baleful images harassed his dreams, shadowed his days, and then hounded him to sleep again. He knew from the wan faces around him, he was not alone.