Stretching in every direction crystal white, the flats were a genuine wonder, and Sable was drawn in by the scale of it. She left Remy to walk alone in the immaculate light, marveling at it, pulling in the scent of salt warmed by the sun. Meters beneath the crust was the lithium brine that powered the world.
It was practically unfair that one country should have such easy access to eighty percent of the planet’s known supply. The idea made Sable glance back at Remy with concern. Beside him was the General, surveying the vigilant formation of soldiers, marking the ones that had jogged well ahead of her, pointing his attention into the elevation as a signal they should be scanning the peaks for possible threats. Even with all this, neither of them seemed troubled by the risk under their feet.
Sable turned and kept walking for silence, into the stretch of white, mesmerized by the illumination of the clouds stretched thin over the salt, refusing to shield her eyes against the glare that blinded. White underfoot and white above, it did not devour like the night, but obliterated all form with brilliance. It was pure and it was clean. In the quiet, Sable pulled it in and then laid her mind out on it.
Remy saw her fall to her knees. He understood. This was his temple. His god. His salvation.
~~~~~~
The General wouldn’t say it, but he watched her kneeling, unmoved for hours, and was thinking, She is crazy as hell.
She had asked Remy to stay until night. When Berringer learned of the request, he had looked around at the empty landscape and scowled, “Why?”
“It is something she needs to witness,” Remy explained.
“What is there to witness?”
“The darkness over light is what she told me.”
It rattled the General. After hours of pushing the soldiers, each would admit, though they knew it made them sound insane, a memory of shadows, a fear of the dark and the night.
“Like fucking wraiths or something, there was something in here. There were shadows under the lights.” Then, like a memory just surfaced, “It was Fallon. He turned off the lights.”
Fallon denied ever touching the lights, and Lieutenant Parker, who’d been beside him, said it never happened. They’d been in the computer room beside the Major’s office and hadn’t seen a thing. The Major had supervised them the whole time and knew nothing about the escape until the cameras were brought back online, and it wasn’t until the General arrived, that he heard any mention of wraiths or shadows.
The guard on the gate kept saying it was too dark to see if anyone had been observing the prison and could hardly be convinced it had happened in the moments before sunset. Berringer sent the whole lot to the medical center to be tested and then changed their posts permanently. Only Lieutenant Fallon had been spared transfer.
“So where has she gone?” Remy asked.
“Into the night.” Berringer swept his hand across the sky in disbelief. “That’s what they said when I asked. Where did she go? And they all shrugged and told me, ‘Into the night.’” Berringer laid his focus on Sable with suspicion.
Misunderstanding his expression, Remy said, “She is going to be fine. You did not need to come. The next time, trust us to be in excellent order with your men.”
Berringer chewed a sound of denial. He looked across the flat at the soldiers in uniform on the perimeter, scanning the elevations with binoculars for movement, then closer at the suited security team that stayed near the King. “If she decides to kill someone, I don’t know which of my men could stop her. She’s been trained in—damn, I hate to give it such a dignified name—but that was the Whirling Wind. None of my people have been trained to counter it. None of them have seen one, and I’m not doing backflips for them. If it was anyone else, I’d tell them to just shoot the flipping monkey before it did any harm.”
“Aside from the blade,” Remy’s sideways glance was nearly apologetic, “it did not appear she gave you much trouble.”
Berringer wished it were so. “She’s good, Remy. Not the best of a small lot, but then she was motivated by madness and didn’t follow the tenets of her craft to disengage when she struck me. Had she, I never would have caught her.”
“Her training is unique?”
The General grunted agreement. “It went out of fashion over three centuries ago. The Way of the Wind trained killers for hire, but the method died soon after the pistol. The gun was the world’s great equalizer. In their day, the school’s disciples were some the best for a very specific role. They can defend themselves adequately if backed against a wall, but they didn’t study for combat. They emerge to strike quick death. They’re taught to abandon a fight and kill later if challenged too strongly. It’s the only reason I pinned her: she didn’t relent. But their craft has little use today. Flip all they want, they can’t dodge a well-placed bullet or a machine gun.”
Remy stared ahead at Sable kneeling on the salt. “Then finding the person that taught her should be easy.”
Berringer thought of his father. He wasn’t the Laughing Master when infamy found him. He didn’t gain that title until after the birth of his son to his young wife. Lucas knew him only as fair and magnanimous, dependable and honorable. There was no one he trusted more. Sable had complained once of divided loyalties, but Berringer had never felt its corruption before. “As you know, I swore my own oath of secrecy to train, you knew that when we met. I would be loath to try and break another’s. If you’ll permit, I will respectfully bow out of that obligation.”
Remy looked into the setting sun without speaking. He knew that if Lucas had not known from the start who trained the assassin before them, he would not give a toss about breaking Sable’s promise and would not have left the two of them alone for an instant. Remy knew his wife and his chief of defense shared the same strategist, but Girard had not yet found the location of the infamous traitor.
~~~~~~
Nika had a tremor she didn’t have before. It was in her voice and in the hand that tried to drink the water Max pressed on her. “I should have never flown it here.” She knew it was true. “I should have dumped it and got another, but I am so seriously fucked in the head right now.” She put the water down before she dropped it. “I had enough trouble keeping my shit together to get here. You guys have to go deal with it. I don’t even want to burn it.”
Enzo was burning more than a plane in his mind. All their identities would have to go too. And they needed to get out of this hangar with their gear immediately. They needed space from whoever Nika had just led back to them. To hurry it all along, Enzo had cut out lines from Max’s stash of amphetamines and let everyone at it.
He was furiously ripping cables out of Max’s computers when Max called him to the plane.
Enzo thought it had to be the speed mixed with too many sedatives because Max seemed entirely too complacent, even pleased with the situation. “Nika wakes up in the plane and the transponder has already been ripped out. Ripped full the fuck out and left dead in her lap so she can’t for a second think there is anything obvious in the plane to track her. Who would have prepared it like that?”
Enzo was too busy mentally packing to care or guess.
“Look.” Max tried to press on Enzo his goggles and black light. He was pointing deep into the empty pit hacked out of the dash. “Know whose half-wiped fingerprint’s in there?”
“I don’t need to look at it, Max. It’s a fingerprint, and I don’t read fingerprint.”
Max put his handheld scanner under Enzo’s face with the match on the screen. “It’s fucking Marlow’s.”
Enzo stopped the pack and burn. The whole airport went in and out of focus and he swayed with it. He was again not very sure on his feet.
They both turned to study Nika. She was pacing around the plane Enzo told her she was going to have to fly them out in, patting the fuselage like it were a beast to be tamed, telling both it and herself, “We got this. We can do this. It’s no big deal.”
“This plane is safe.” Max was certain. “There’s not going to be any tag on i
t leading the King’s men back to us.”
“Keep checking it. We’re still moving, but we might have time for Nika to sit down.”
She had ditched the cotton prison garb for a shirt that told the world to “eat shit.” She hadn’t said much more than someone, probably General Bear, had arranged her release and she knew it was so she could be followed back to her contacts, but she was going on four months in solitary with so little sleep it seemed more like a year, and the split between what she knew needed to happen and what she was capable no longer existed. Neither Enzo nor Max cared. They’d burn it all to the ground and go under, but Enzo wondered if it was necessary.
Enzo hated to ask it of her, but he had to know, “Do you think Marlow had anything to do with getting you out?”
Nika pulled back with disgust. “Hell, no. Marlow wouldn’t dose me. That was a big, black scary acid trip. Those fuckers drugged me.” Her memory squinted into the dark. “Everything was as fucked up as it ever was and then shadows seeped into the cell, like some kind of dark living smoke, but,” she shook her head at Enzo knowing he wouldn’t understand, “it was feminine. I know that sounds mad, but after four months in a prison with mostly men, you can’t mistake the presence of …” she struggled to describe it, “the darkness was female.” Then she wiped it all away with her hands. “It was hallucinations. It was acid, a really heavy dose, but they’ve tweaked it. It didn’t come on like acid. It was just suddenly a full on, out of your head, bad trip. And then it was over. Bam. Cold sober, I am sitting in that plane with a bashed up transponder in my lap and a key in the ignition. I can’t remember details because I didn’t recognize a damn thing as it was happening, but I knew I was on the scariest ride through dark hell. There was nothing about that shit that said Marlow.” After a moment, she conceded, “Well, that’s not exactly true.” Eyes watering at the edge, she looked up to the high-domed ceiling to keep tears from falling and told Enzo, “The whole time I thought I heard her telling me everything was about to be sunshine.”
Queen Mother
Inside a tank overlooking the front of the burned out courthouse where Felix Magnus spoke, a crew commander passed a second paper packet of sunshine to his gunner. Holding one nostril closed, he noisily pulled powder from the first packet deeper until he felt it burn his throat and tasted the bitter effects. He shuddered and allowed his arms to fall to his sides while his eyes blurred into nothing.
The King’s Army was present on the side streets leading into the square where the protesters gathered. It had been a strategic risk to lift the curfews and give Ulphia the right to assemble, but the loosening of restrictions had seen the fury of the working class reduced. Just two weeks after thousands had cheered as the courthouse burned, the protest was down to just a few dozen dedicated radicals. The soldiers had been warned Sierran agitators would try to provoke a deadly reaction, but, unless their lives were threatened, the soldiers had been ordered to take it. The policy was working. The dissidents were becoming bored. Felix Magnus spoke to a dwindling crowd.
“What I wouldn’t give to fire a round straight through his face.” The commander readjusted his helmet to settle the crawl of his scalp.
At this range, the gunner didn’t need to use the tracking system, but to provide some amusing relief to the monotony, he locked Felix as his target. “Pretentious prick.” The gunner snorted from the packet and lifted his voice mockingly high, “They won’t let me do what I want.” Shoulders bent and heaving, the gunner sobbed, “Daddy told me no and made me cry.” Trying to maintain the tantrum over the advancing stupor, he ended slowly, “I’m gonna do whatever I want.”
In one of his screens, the commander saw men from infantry ducking behind the tank as paint splattered the street and the tank’s side armor. “What the hell are they on at the checkpoints not to catch paint balloons?”
“General needs to send more pressure washers. We’re gonna spend all night cleaning this bitch.” The gunner pressed his eyes into the sight and ran his thumb in circles over the fire switch. He felt the tension in the button like erotic pleasure. “We could show them the ultimate libertine act.”
Drifting in careless inertia, the commander’s voice held no concern, “Gunner, I say do whatever you want.”
~~~~~~
It was not uncommon for someone to be rapping lightly on Catherine’s office door in the late evening, but Sable had never appeared after the summons to enter. Sable acknowledged the peculiarity of it by lifting her features with ironic enthusiasm.
“I hoped you had time to speak.”
“Always,” was Catherine’s reply.
The two sat facing each other in chairs before Catherine’s desk. The sound of the night rally playing live from Ulphia was soft in the background. Sable looked to the side to watch it play large on the wall. The number of protesters had diminished measurably and each night they assembled smaller. They held the blackened courthouse and its lawn with Felix calling for disorder from the top of the stairs.
“Their singular desire does in many ways reflect my own.” Both hands in her lap, Sable thought of a way to begin this most vulnerable of conversations. She considered the events that had brought her to seek out the intelligence chief and then, distressed by the memories, she held the wide bracelet on her wrist. “You know what they did and you know how I returned it.”
Catherine was seldom unsure of what was transpiring. She could think of few conversations in the last decade she had not expected, and all the surprises had somehow involved Sable. The strangeness of the occasion made her response serious, “I know what you’ve admitted.”
“That is enough to begin.” She covered the jeweled reminder by relaxing her hand. “Despite what happened, I receive a request every day from the Cloitare to return and accept the ritual that would shed one title for the next. They are becoming more insistent, stalking me through the halls of late. They wish to continue the progression from Bound Bride to Queen Mother to Mother of All t—”
Girard nearly heard her say to, to another title, but she stopped short.
“The Libertines,” Sable pointed at the screen, “they have my sympathies. Had a train not wrecked, I would be there among them. I am an anarchist at heart.” A sense of futility allowed her only part of a smile. “But I am a realistic nihilist. I know it can never work. There will always be insatiable egotists who need to dominate and control, and there cannot be anarchy if no one follows the rules.” At the joke, she caught a bitter laugh in her throat. “To have the free world Felix imagines, people must be willing to take away another’s freedom or their life to ensure it, and there are not enough servile psychopaths to police that sort of libertine paradise.”
Girard absorbed the admissions. With perfect clarity, she saw the impetus that had consistently set Sable in motion, a calamitous revolt against authority. Yet she was erratically humble and deferential to some: Master Aidan, the King, and, of late, Girard had watched her give a wary respect to the General. “That is a dangerous position to hold when you would be queen of a kingdom.”
“I will only be queen to a king.”
“Ah.” Catherine understood. “Loyal only to the individual.”
“I have no desire to lead, and no desire to follow. Though, to my secret shame, I serve rather well when I respect the instructor.” It was impossible to tell if her smile was meant to flatter or dare Catherine to try. “I have always resided more in the moment. I do not possess your grand vision of,” she made a circle of all that was before them, “the scheme of things. And since this,” she flicked her wrist, “my actions tend to be visceral without regard for consequence.” Sable relaxed her whole demeanor to appear casual, “There are outcomes I desire but do not know how to achieve. I need your instructions.”
The spymaster barely dared to hope she heard correctly. Girard believed she had just been offered control of the ultimate agent. She believed the Mother of All, with her self-professed nihilist axe-wielding rage, had just asked to be brought to foc
us under her directive.
The offer would not be refused, Sable knew, but the negotiations had yet to begin. Sable wanted to give Catherine time to accept what had been extended, so she moved her eyes to the screen as Felix Magnus told the crowd, “We will do what we want and accept no other law.” Not as loud as she had heard it weeks before, the crowd chanted back, “We will do what we want.”
Felix raised his hands into the air to declare, “Do what you will shall be the whole of the law.”
The place Felix Magnus occupied erupted in white smoke and dust. A low thundering explosion made the crowd stoop in a wave that broke into panic.
Girard saw Sable come to her feet and call out with dread, “Catherine.” When Catherine looked at the screen, Sable said, “That was the sound of a tank.”
The white cloud was dispersing with the breeze, revealing rubble and a gaping hole in the wall of the courthouse.
Sable said with terrible dismay, “We’ve killed Felix Magnus.”
~~~~~~
Ulphia’s radicals returned in force with renewed vigor and malice. The square, with its burnt and blasted courthouse, could not contain them. They surged into the neighboring streets, pressing toward the mobile command of the King’s battalion. No one believed the assassination of Felix Magnus was a mechanical error.
In under a week, Ulphia had stopped throwing paint and now threw anything that burned or exploded. The well-armed country of conscripts had an instant rebel army, but their hundred-year-old rifles couldn’t penetrate the modern army’s armor, and their snipers were, for the moment, untrained and inaccurate shots.
Civilian casualties filled both the city and military hospitals as the army fought to suppress them.
A second uprising was happening in the capital, Helena, as many thousands more pushed against the Prime Minister’s administrative house, demanding he order King Remius out of the border.
Sister Sable (The Mad Queen Book 1) Page 15
