Brown River Queen (30 page)

The bone-men fell in scores. The smoke from the rifles filled the ruined casino with a thick and choking fog. Lady Rondalee still held the stage, her voice a dry croak, but her words still sounding.

I counted a dozen dancers limp and pale, still moving though dead or nearly so. Evis and Gertriss still held their heads upright, still showed signs of life in their movements.

“What about them?” said Darla, tearing her eyes away from Gertriss and Evis.

“When the shadow gate closes, the music box will be inside. They’ll stop dancing. You’ll see.”

“You’re makin’ that up, boy. Though it does make a kind of sense.”

“With any luck, as soon as we close the shadow, the music box will start making those damned things in the shadow dance.” I had a brief vision of the monstrous, shambling hulks I’d seen in that place, locked forever in some clumsy round of pirouettes twenty stories tall.

That’s what you get for hurting my friends, I thought. Dance ’til Doomsday, you bastards.

Mama stomped hard on my foot.

“What the hell was that for?”

“Sorry, boy, you got a funny look all the sudden. All glazed over like. Thought you was about to start dancing with them others.”

“Smoke got in my eyes. Save it for Hag Mary, Mama.”

Another wave of skeletons poured out of the gap in the
Queen’s
hull. This time, though, something came with them.

I used to fish the Brown, like every other poor kid in the city. We’d sneak into the big lumber yards and dig at the edges of the mountains of sawdust. There we’d find enormous, fat nightcrawler worms, perfect for catching Brown River catfish.

This was like those nightcrawler worms, only as big around as I was tall. It glistened, and its segmented, oily body heaved and pulsed. It knocked bone-men aside and ground them into splinters as it struggled to push its bulk toward us.

Stitches gave the rotary gun a final savage blow and brought it to bear, cranking it with her pale, thin arm. It erupted in gunfire, and the rounds slammed full into the eyeless face of the worm.

The worm raised up, its end splitting into a wet opening lined with spikes. It howled as the rounds sank in. Thin, black blood spewed with each impact. It made a deep, gurgling roar and surged forward, rising higher, towering above Stitches.

A halfdead leaped to the other gun and began cranking and firing. He stitched a line of wounds across its neck. Black blood splashed and flew, but the creature kept coming.

Stitches backed away from her gun. A halfdead leaped to her place. She lifted her hands, filled them with light, and hurled an infant sun toward the worm.

The
Queen
shook, her deck heaving as the thing slammed its bulk down and then—flames coursing from its maw—it began to flail wildly about, striking the deck again, the ceiling, the walls. The guns followed it as best they could, sending wood chips flying and probably carving fist-sized holes in the deck and the hull.

Skeletons swarmed about, nearly lost in the smoke and the dark. All but one of the massive hanging lights were extinguished by the worm’s death throes, leaving us all half-blind.

A grinning skeleton gave itself away by clacking its teeth. I shattered its skull with a wild shot, and saw other, furtive scurryings in the smoke.

“Stitches, it’s time!” I yelled. Darla took down another bone-man a few yards away. Mama threw a chair at a pair of bony knees and brought her boot down on its skull when it fell. The bone-men managed to send at least a dozen of their fellows past the last chalk line.
 

Stitches climbed atop a felt-covered card table. Halfdead gathered in a ring around her, swords and rifles at the ready.

Stitches raised her glass staff, and a blinding spark of light grew within it.

“Mama, keep a hand on Buttercup. Darla, stay close. Let’s go.”

I led them out through the doors. Out of the choking gun-smoke and the stink of the worm thing’s dark blood. Out onto the
Queen’s
porched decks, where lines of nervous faces kept watch on the dark.

“Be ready, people,” I shouted. “Don’t be in a hurry. Don’t shoot your neighbors. Don’t jump in the river unless you can swim.”

All was quiet for a moment. Muddy water rushed past. Above, there was moonless night, the usual stars, a distant river-bank lined with the tall, black boughs of deep forest.
 

Mama rested the barrel of her rifle on the rail. “Boy, how do I shoot this contraption, again? Pull this?”

Before I could warn her, she tugged at the trigger, and the rifle jumped and barked.

Night gave way briefly to day. The primal father of all thunder cracked the sky and sounded across the river.
 

“Damn, boy,” said Mama in hushed tones of awe.

Half a dozen other shots rang out. I cussed and yelled for them to cease firing, all the while blinking and straining to see beyond the rail.

The brief flash had rendered us all half-blind. I finally got them to stop firing about the time I could see again.

The river hadn’t changed. Neither had the sky or the trees.

A ragged cheer rose up. Shouts began to sound from below decks. A door opened, and a pair of Ogres poured out, clubs held at the ready, hooting questions none of us could answer.

The
Queen
shuddered. Her wheel picked up speed and her rudders bit hard. We turned to port, which I prayed was the closest patch of dry, solid ground.

Stitches emerged from the
Queen’s
interior. Gunshots still rang out from within, though they were rifle shots—not the thunder of the rotary guns.

We melted the barrels,
she said.
Some number rushed through.
But the shadow is gone.
 

“Evis and the rest?”

No change. Yet. But take heart. The residual effects…

She just stopped talking. She threw back her hood and pointed toward the horizon.

Figures walked there, dark silhouettes like the trees, but moving and towering above them.
 

There was a man, in old-style armor, with horns on his helmet.

There was a tall, thin man bearing a staff.

Between them was a crone, hunched and bent, her hair as wild as Mama’s, her nails grown long and twisted.

“Damn damn damn,” said Mama. She wrestled with her gun, managed to jam it by pulling back the bolt without firing first. “I can’t swim, boy. But I reckon I might try anyways.”

The dark giants walked. Trees snapped and broke beneath their feet. Flocks of panicked birds rose up, wheeling away against the starry sky.

“Hag Mary and friends?”

The sorcerer is Daroth. The warrior was called Hurlt. I suspected Daroth, but thought Hurlt diminished.
 

“I don’t suppose they’ll agree to give us a two-hour head start?”

They reached the riverbank. I guessed we must have been a mile away, but they took up half the sky.
 

More gunfire sounded from within. A rotary gun fired, blazing away, either through a melted barrel or a fresh one. Men shouted. Ogres roared. A battle raged behind the casino doors, and I realized any of the monsters looking down upon the
Queen
could end it all, end us all, with a single godlike tread.

A voice sounded from the sky. I could not make out the words, though I could feel them rattle my chest.

“I’ve always loved you,” said Darla, slipping her arm around my waist.

“No one can blame you for that.”

Stitches spoke, shouting wordlessly across the waters.

Your vocal cords are several yards long, at your chosen stature,
she said.
I cannot understand your speech. Please repeat your demands.

Idiots,
she added, in a whisper I was sure only Darla and I could hear.

Another flash of daylight. This time I managed to close my eyes in time. When I opened them again, Hag Mary and her strolling companions were reduced in size to a mere hundred feet, knee-deep in the muddy Brown River maybe fifty yards away.

“Give unto us this upstart you name the Regent,” said the armored giant.

“We will grant thee the boon of a swift death,” added the robed wizard.

“Give him to me,” screeched Hag Mary. Her eyes glinted like dirty stars beneath her mane of hair. Gobs of foul-smelling spittle fell like sleet as she spoke. “I will have him!”

Stitches put her elbows on the rail.

Do you even understand what it is your masters wish to bring about?
 

“I hath no master,” bellowed the warrior.

“Nor I,” said the wizard.

Hag Mary spat, raising a splash that nearly reached the
Queen
.

Darla poked me, raised a finger to her lips, pointed at the sky above the Hag and the wizard and the warrior.

A star grew brighter as I watched, and brighter still. It grew larger as well.
 

I understand,
continued Stitches.
I remember the last time your masters walked the earth. I remember their cruelty, their violent whims, their mindless caprice. I remember. And I tell you, I will not have it. Not again.

The star went from the size of a coin to that of an apple. It grew so bright the Hag and her companions began to cast faint shadows.

“Tear the vessel apart!” screamed the Hag, striding forward, waves breaking about her thighs. “Find him!”

They advanced. Stitches rose.

She turned to me and smiled a bloody little smile.

All those long years digging,
she said, soundless voice booming.
Digging ever deeper, scrambling for trinkets, for things best left buried.

Hag Mary was nearly upon us, growing taller than the Brass Bell tower, or the tallest spire at Wherthmore. Her arms were outstretched, and I could see her hands were filthy by the light of the growing star.

A faint roar rose, and the line of trees began to lean, blown over by a sudden growing wind.

Stitches shook her head.

All that time digging, Hag. You would have been better served had you looked up. Astronomy, bitch.

Have some.

Stitches raised her glass staff. Hag Mary howled and grabbed at us, but her nails scratched uselessly against a transparent bubble.

The light grew bright as day. I saw the warrior and the wizard turn, saw the Hag tower up against a blinding new sun—

—and then the bubble turned inky black and rang like a bell.
 

The
Queen’s
deck pitched forward, and we all went spilling down into the night.

Chapter Sixteen

According to Stitches, the sky is full of stones.

I pondered that often in the days that followed. There wasn’t much to do but ponder. The
Queen
, more or less intact, rested on dry, scorched earth at the bottom of a pit we determined to be two hundred and six feet deep and nearly two miles across.

That’s what happens when one of these sky-stones falls to earth,
says Stitches.
The impact is so great the very land is changed.

I know this to be true. I sacrificed my best pair of boots climbing the shallow grade of the pit. A dozen of us made the trip and peeked over the smoking rim to view the devastation beyond.

All about us, the trees were laid flat, their trunks radiating out from a point in the heart of the pit. The soil lay bare and baked. The Brown River was gone, and the sky was an angry red, still choked with the ash from a thousand small fires.

We searched, we did, for the remains of Hag Mary and her companions. We found nothing. Stitches assures me nothing unprepared for such a force could possibly have survived.

As I sit on the deck of a boat in sudden want of a river and watch steam rise from fissures all about me, I am inclined to believe her.

These stones in the heavens,
said Stitches,
float in great slow circles.
She’d captured one, years ago, and started drawing it ever closer, keeping it ready for the time she would need a single irresistible blow.

Even Hag Mary’s legendary might hadn’t been enough to save her. Stitches claims we survived only by the narrowest of margins.
 

The
Queen’s
smoke-stacks would agree. One is a melted, slumping lump. The other was cut off clean at the top by Stitches’s final spell.

It took two full days for the Brown to begin to flow again, coursing down the north side of our pit first in a trickle and then in a stream. The heat from the blasted ground turned the trickle to steam at first, but soon the water reached the bottom and our hole became a shallow but deepening lake. It took ten days, but the
Queen
rose with the water, and we knew we would soon be able to turn her battered face north and steam for home.

Before the waters rose, we
 
dug twenty-eight graves, out there at the bottom of what was soon a lake.
 

Evis and Gertriss and the rest of the dancers were freed the moment the sky-stone struck. Evis is credited with turning the tide of battle in the casino. At one point he apparently wielded both rotary guns like pistols and charged a dragon. There’s a rumor the Ogres are writing a song about it.