Sister Sable (The Mad Queen Book 1)

by T. Mountebank

  The conflict was outshining the furor of the religious who were, Max thought, entirely too fucking loud and well represented for their small numbers in Alena. The royalist minority couldn’t put enough of their considerable wealth behind the sectarian lunacy to pull the public’s growing infatuation away from the uprising. Traditional news speculated about wedding gowns, but people swapped pictures of soldiers painted yellow. And the government, just desperate to hold onto power and align with the winning side, was saying nothing intelligent, but doing nothing stupid.

  Max wasn’t really needed in Ulphia. Enzo’s kids weren’t being arrested, and he wasn’t going to get his head cracked open while locking arms in the street. He didn’t chant slogans or throw paint, so instead he worked on getting into Marlow’s data. It was taking time because he’d found a second drive, and she’d done some crazy shit to lock up the hardware. Max didn’t want to destroy the thing falling for the traps she’d set.

  “Master hack, huh?” Enzo laughed.

  “Hell, yes. I saw ‘em, right?”

  “And how long now?”

  Max didn’t know. “The whole unit’s in a wet tank until I figure out how to keep it from blowing up. I never should have turned those screws.”

  Salt Mountain

  Nika was glad she wasn’t one of the moles in the mountain. Those poor devils hacking away for ore were a desperate lot. When the empire eventually exhausted the lithium brine in the great bowl of the mountain and looked to the elevations for more, they were going to find quite a few of the peaks run through with tunnels.

  Nika was not very far away from their folly though. She was in the sky with a hold full of counterfeits stamped with the King’s perfect seal. The batteries had half the life of the King’s but sold for a third of the price and, making sales even brisker, none of them had exploded in the last five years. The old Jenevuede Pulp Mill, outside the capital with its clandestine refinery, had improved production after burning down its original home in the disused oil refinery.

  Erentrude, with hardly any pollution, was still foreign air to Nika. It held the plane lighter, smelled different, and required the darkest sunglasses. Without them, the sun would come down unimpeded and blast through your retinas to scorch the back of your skull. It played havoc on the circular bowl of Salt Mountain, creating such wild drafts not even the dumbest of fools would fly there, which made security incredibly light.

  Nika was in their peaks flying for Enzo’s new hangar when her eyes began to itch. Smoke. Definitely smoke.

  Simultaneously, she scanned the horizon and the panel but saw nothing to account for it. Before she could turn in her seat to look behind, the cause made itself known.

  The explosion was a shock in the quiet above the clouds. She flinched and ducked as though a gun had been fired at her back. It had been loud, decisive, and over in the flash that created it. Next would come the flames.

  She knew the sound intimately. In the angrier moments of her delinquent youth, she had deliberately overcharged the batteries she’d stolen just to hear them pop. The blaze that followed was mesmerizing. Shock and then long burning beauty.

  She still had power in the motor, but the spare light flashed empty. Behind, in the hold, she heard creaks, hissing, and the snap of a buckle ripped from the harness. The batteries sitting over the auxiliary compartment had warmed with the overheating spare. With it now on fire, the cargo was getting hotter, swelling, pushing against the constraint of space. The first hint of smoke would signal quick death. If any of the batteries flared, it would all be over before she could land. She would end as a bang in the sky and a rain of stunning color.

  Mountains and more mountains save for the flat in the center. “Sweet sister Sable,” Nika swore. The option was insane. Not daring to reduce the throttle, she dropped nose to the ground and dove down the side, aiming for the King’s own runway of salt.

  ~~~~~~

  Enzo thought he was back in the same nightmare, only this time he didn’t have the innocence to think he could wake them.

  He had tried to sound calm, “Just put her down and run. Put her down wherever you have to. We know where you are; we will get you out.”

  Nika kept her phone on through the descent, the hard landing, the sliding stop. Enzo heard her running from the plane, screaming for the soldiers who were speeding to the impromptu landing to turn the vehicle around. “Back! Back! Run the fuck away.” But they skidded to a stop beside her and threw her face first on the salt.

  Enzo knew they felt the heat of the explosion.

  It cracked on and on. The first blast burst into another while the ground was smacked with flaming debris. Enzo heard shouts to run. He heard their first steps crunching over the salt before the tantrum of destruction really kicked off. A flare-up in the center split the plane in half. He heard a flat panel ripped from the ribs flapping free through the air, but he never heard it land as pack after pack detonated in staccato. It was a warehouse full of fireworks set off with a machine gun. The ground splintered open, swallowing what remained of the plane, sinking it in a sizzling hiss of brine, but still the batteries erupted, sending geysers of water splashing across the salt flat and into Enzo’s earpiece.

  Enzo wondered how far they had gotten. He listened for the worst.

  He heard a harsh breath expelled as someone was brought down, and then commands to “Roll, roll, roll,” while another was screaming, “I’m on fucking fire!”

  His taunt muscles weakened to tremors when he finally heard Nika’s first words of denial: “God damn liquor, man. Who knew booze could do that?”

  Recovery

  For a week, every time Sable surfaced, she told him, “Go save them.”

  And Aidan would promise, “They are safe.”

  Then she found some sort of footing, a little island with space to gather memories, and she asked, “Where are they?”

  “In the convent.”

  “Then they are not safe.”

  “They are under my protection,” he assured.

  It was not meant as an accusation, “I was under your protection.”

  She would never find the memory, and he would never lose it, of the first days when she held him fast by the robes afraid of drowning in an unfamiliar sea of broken ice and battering whirlpools. Sleep only came when the doctor put needle to vein and forced her there, but on waking, she would latch hold again.

  Aidan was waiting, hoping that enough of her would gather to recognize she was gone.

  Hands wound in his robes, frantic not to drift away and be lost, she had pulled them both to the floor. With rare clarity, she saw the madness of it. Sable spoke through with a frustrated plea, “Help me.”

  It was what he had hoped against expectation to hear.

  Releasing his fear, Aidan submerged himself in the violent current to become the anchor in time, constantly reminding here and now.

  Here and now, like when she was a child and needed to forget.

  Here and now would bring her to the present, above the slipping fragments that gave no support.

  She was with him and then she was gone, losing her balance on concepts that could not carry weight, sliding under, coming up, and every time Aidan called her back with here and now.

  ~~~~~~

  The king of Erentrude had been schooled in politics, economics, languages, as well as the basics from mathematics to biology, and he took a particular interest in chemistry, but he had never been taught the fundamentals of mental management. To be in the present seemed meaningless in practice when the present was merely the place in which to plan for the future or review the past.

  “Few are the numbers that possess the present,” Aidan had told him. But it was there he needed to be if he would see Sable.

  Aidan had warned, “She is not fit to travel,” to the future or the past. The Master and Mentor made the established sound fantastic. Like magic, they all moved through time.

  In the beginning, Remy would arrive to find her serene, but wit
hin minutes of speaking, he would have managed to turn her blind and frantic. He had tried once to console her, saying, “You will be better soon,” but this made things worse, sending her forward and back. Better how? And why was she worse? She went looking for answers while he watched her slip under.

  The search would always draw her features together in angst, squinting to see through the confusion. Wherever she went, Remy recognized, it was entirely too bright and the landscape harsh and perplexing.

  So Remy learned to stay in the moment, never to mention what laid ahead or behind. He learned it was quiet in the present. And then he learned it was calm. He would visit with chocolates and fruit, intending to be brief, but then, transfixed by her simple smile, he would settle. He began to arrive knowing he would stay, bringing with him a tablet to silently read while she watched.

  She stared excessively long, but he did not mind. The expression, so open and defenseless, was too earnest to cause distress. He considered it was her dress. He had never seen her in anything except the austere robes of the order, but here in the medical rooms, she wore pastel-colored cottons that changed the shade of her pale eyes. She looked soft and harmless, her face too vulnerable to be Cloitare.

  He watched her slowly chewing on the gifts he brought, returning his gaze with warmth, completely unlike the nun who had run away and without a trace of the guile when she returned. He knew whatever she had been through, she had not come out the same.

  ~~~~~~

  “Look, fucker.” Max pointed at the screen. “I know where she is. I just don’t know how to get her out.”

  It wasn’t what Enzo wanted to hear. He stalked away from the live video of Nika sitting bored on the edge of the stone shelf of a bed.

  “I’ve found her detainment report.” Max tapped open a file where he’d saved it. She’d given her name as Ellis Dee. “But this shit is not the same as civilian release. These cunts don’t have some hundred arraignments an hour I can lose her in. They don’t set bail. The soldiers who arrested her aren’t handing it over to a cheap-suited prosecutor to file the charges. All the gaps I use to free our dealers don’t exist in their world. She’s a single entity being held without charge in a near-empty military prison. Look at it: it’s running on a skeleton crew while their buddies are off in Alena hosing down our customers in the detention camps. Every soldier in that prison knows she’s there. And making her disappear is not any easier with her good looks or that goddamn wheels-on-fire arrival she did. Some bullshit electronic message by a general to release her is going to be hard checked, then they’ll know I’m in their system and someone is trying to get her out. You need to sit the fuck down and give me time to find something to exploit.”

  Max had slept very little in past six months. He’d spent the first five months obsessed with Marlow’s memory drives, but since Nika went down, he’d been snorting lines of amphetamines and eating anodyne to take the edge off.

  While he waited for some change in Nika’s status, he’d been scrolling through military reports all the way back to the day Marlow had vanished. He didn’t think the army had her. It was a strange coincidence the King’s cousin was on the same train when Marlow went missing. But if they did have her, fuck knows what name she had given them either, so he searched for Alenan landings and missions, but those results referred to a file called Retrieve that was off the shared lines. The file was on a private network and Max couldn’t access it unless he was in-house. Unable to make progress there, he searched through the financial accounts for Alenan and Eudokian expenses, but there was nothing of interest. When he searched for the Cloitare, he was directed again to the in-house server and the file Retrieve.

  While he cursed the closed network, the screen with Nika filled with soldiers. She rose in alarm and retreated to the wall while slapping them back. One soldier locked her arms and another went for her shirt.

  Enzo grabbed Max’s shoulder. Neither could speak for fear of what they might see. But the soldiers went for her arm. Her friends saw her head loll as the needle was pulled from her vein.

  As she was hauled from the cell for questioning, Max kicked back from the desk and dropped his head flat to his knees. “We need fucking Marlow.”

  Enzo knew this too, but said, “I suspect Marlow needs Marlow.”

  ~~~~~~

  Remy was there when the doctor said the bandage on her wrist should stay off. Branson had told her, “When it is properly healed, we can discuss ways to reduce the scars.”

  But she had dismissed the idea with finality. “It will not be necessary.” She had mastered the present and moved to a fatalistic future Remy found foreboding.

  The King spoke to Aidan in the hall outside the room where she slept. “She is not going back to the Cloitare.”

  “She is the Mother of All. She is the Cloitare.”

  “She will not pass its doors again.”

  “She must. She is the Mother of All and she is obliged to unite her family.” Aidan stopped Remy from proceeding in the futile argument. “She will gain control of her house. In destroying her, they have transcended her myth. She is more powerful than you can imagine. The old mothers assured the young that if she were truly the mother the prophets revealed then the mind could not harm her. She returns from a place no shattered life has. They do not know why. They do not know where I taught her to hide. It is impossible for them that she should return, and yet she does. Her title is incontestable, as it must be to protect you.”

  Remy was infuriated with the obscure. “Protect me from what my own people can’t?”

  “The future.” Then Aidan inclined his head with deference to the memory. “And the past.”

  ~~~~~~

  When the scar on Sable’s wrist became a thick band of red and her palms began to scar white, Aidan sought out the King.

  Remy was alone in his rooms sitting in the large circle of couches and chairs that seldom held anyone except his three advisors. He was looking again through pictures of the plane that had unexpectedly landed and then exploded on the salt flat. Images of the wreckage were followed by remnants of the batteries that had been recovered with the Ministry of Energy’s royal seal. Had the salt not cracked under the repeated blasts and dropped the plane into the brine, nothing would have remained.

  The pilot was being held by the army. Berringer had told Remy she was claiming to have no knowledge of what she was carrying, but this contradicted her running from the plane warning it was about to explode. After some nights awake, she admitted she had picked up the load on a disused airfield some eight hours away, but when a team went to inspect it, they found it had washed out in heavy rains months previous. If she was unaware of the rains and the erosion, it was likely her plane had been loaded at a strip closer to the mine. She told them to believe what they wanted but held to her story, telling the interrogator, “Did your boys tell you how I came smoking down the mountain? I am a bitch of a pilot. I don’t need an airstrip. So what if it washed out? I can put any plane down on any runway no matter its condition. I picked up where I said I picked up.” They had shot her full of hypnotics, but the most she would tell them was, “I’ve had better.” Even when they showed her pictures of the mucked up strip with the cavernous hole in the center, after she cracked with spontaneous laughter at the ridiculousness of her assertion, she still insisted she’d done it. “Damn bumpy it was. But like I said, I’m a bitch of a pilot.”

  “Anyone can be broken,” Berringer repeated Sable’s words.

  When Remy did not want to hear what his advisors had to say, he would retreat behind the desk that overlooked the sitting space. “No,” he said after some thought. “Just hold her and wait. She’s a pilot. She’ll want her freedom soon enough.”

  Remy moved behind the desk again to receive Master Aidan. The man always dominated a room, but he seemed larger this time, threatening not with authority but zeal. He was a mass of vitality focused on Remy, and Remy was alarmed.

  “I will speak to you this once with my tr
ue voice, King of the Clementyne Dynasty, may you not be the last. Hear me and know what you hear is the truth.”

  Remy felt embraced. He felt like he was quite small, someone’s pet, and he’d been scooped up into the hand to be cradled there for his own good. He felt the boom of Aidan’s speech resonate in his chest and head, vibrating his mouth and nose, terrifying his heart.

  “The time has come to fulfill the bargain made for your crown. The Mother of All is among us and you are the son that needs her. And I, in whose name it was written, will grant you both a choice: you may save the other or not of your own will. May neither of you falter or all this within and all that beyond is lost. Your rule will end and the blackest night will begin.”

  The master put the small animal down. The reverberation would settle gradually while Remy regained possession of his self.

  “I will take the Bound Bride into the convent. She will know nothing of the preparations that occur beyond its doors. If you would save her, have your witnesses ready for when we emerge. I will give you one month. Stand at the altar ready to receive her. I will then give to her the same option. She will accept you or she will be the death of us all.”

  The sensation over Remy vanished leaving him in a hard reality with sharp edges. He considered for the very first time that the prophet promised by scripture before him was something more than a man. But through the fear of such unknowns, the threats and ultimatums of Aidan’s words began to solidify in Remy’s mind. He knocked away the touch of something ethereal. His royal prerogative had just been invasively assaulted and provoked to rage. “I refuse every part of it this very minute.”