“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.
Gertriss slept for two days with Mama and Evis hovering over her like fidgety nursemaids. Halfdead and soothsayer nearly came to blows more than once over the application of cold cloths to Gertriss’s forehead, but Darla believes that’s how they’ve decided to proceed with their newfound friendship.
Our current best guess at our position puts us some hundred and forty miles south of Rannit. Stitches claims the blast probably flattened every tree in a circle twenty-five miles across, and tore the hell out of an area twice that large.
All that, from a sky-stone she claims was not much bigger than my house.
Astronomy, she calls it.
I don’t think I want to know what else is circling me, far far above.
Gunfire left seventy-seven holes in the Queen’s hull. Patching them took three full days, even with a dozen Ogres pitching in.
The moment we were seaworthy, Evis ordered the casino restored and opened for business.
He declared all remaining foodstuffs and every drop of surviving liquor free for the duration of the voyage.
The party was in full swing by sundown.
Laughter and happy shouts sounded from inside. Gambling machines chimed and tinkled and rang. Cheers went up when someone won and roars sounded when they lost.