Frank Tuttle - Brown River Queen

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.

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.

You appear to be deep in thought, said Stitches as she sat down in a deck chair beside me. She balanced a plate of biscuits and a two hot cups of tea on her lap. Care to share your ruminations?

“How are you going to eat that?”

She chuckled. I brought it for you. I thought Mrs. Markhat was here as well. She expressed a desire earlier today for simpler fare than the kitchen is serving, so I made these.

“You made them?” I reached for one out of politeness.

I find simple culinary tasks relaxing . She gazed with ruined eyes out across the shallow pond that was only now beginning to lap at the Queen’s patched hull. After my recent exertions, I am in need of considerable relaxation.

I took a cup of tea. It wasn’t bad-certainly nothing like the vile bitter brew Mama is so fond of. I took a bite of biscuit and washed it down.

“A couple of things don’t make sense,” I said.

Only a couple?

“I’ve narrowed the list in the interest of expediency. The fake huldra. It lit up that Elf like a fresh-oiled torch. You said it could barely pass as real, even from a distance.”

The Regent’s creature must have imbued it with something of considerable potency.

“Sure. Right. Had to be that.”

I took another bite of the biscuit, another drink of tea.

“So the conspiracy of the summer-born lost this round,” I said. “Lost in a big way.”

We were lucky.

“No.” I wiped my chin and put my tea down on the deck. “We weren’t lucky. This was all planned, right down to the last detail. The Regent led them out here, far away from Rannit, so he could skip back to the High House and you could drop the sky on them.”

I was unaware the Regent had the means to leave the Queen , but yes, your surmise is correct on the other points.

I nodded and laced my fingers behind the back of my head.

“It’s disheartening when old allies keep secrets from each other. Isn’t it, Corpsemaster?”

For a single horrible instant, I thought I’d finally fulfilled Mama’s long standing prophecy that my mouth would be the death of me.

But then she laughed.

Well done, Captain Markhat! Well done, indeed. Tell me-how did you deduce my identity?

“I’ve only tasted a biscuit this bad once before,” I said. “You’re adding too much salt.”

Undone by a rural pastry. How fitting.

Without any fuss or flash, Stitches was gone, and the weary older woman I’d seen only once before was seated in her place.