Read Queen of the Dark Things Online
Authors: C. Robert Cargill
Queen of the Dark Things (28 page)
The willy-willy looked around nervously, beads of sweat forming on his brow. “Nice night for it, eh?”
“For what?” asked Marm. Though she had no eyes, she seemed to gaze suspiciously at him. “Why are you here?”
Shadows awoke. From behind the rocks they crawled, slow, methodical, their movements rigid, measured, like sloths. A slow-motion dance formed in the firelight, flickering specters, naked, their flesh withered, breasts sagging to their stomachs, nipples raw and bleeding, sharpened teeth bared.
They sang, the notes intoxicating.
She-devils.
The willy-willy looked up and waved a dismissive hand. “There's no need for that, ladies. Just a friendly visit is all.”
“You're not here for the plums, are you?” asked Marm.
“No,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his dusty arm.
Marm spoke more slowly now, more deliberately, more forcefully. The air seemed to chill a bit more at the utterance of each word. “Then why . . . are you . . . here?”
“I'm sorry,” he said. “She made me.” He turned and looked over his shoulder just as the massive shadow slunk in from out of the dark of the outback. It was taller than a man, though smaller still than the willy-willy, with six legs, a long neck, a fur the color of night. It was a bunyip. And astride it rode a little girl. A little girl in purple pajamas.
She wore a confident smile, her eyes unflinching, like a gunfighter's. The bunyip bowed, lowering its head to the ground, and the girl slid off it.
“You can go, Virra,” she said to the willy-willy.
“Thank you, my Queen.” Then he turned to the old witch, whispering. “Listen to her, Marm. Trust me.” The winds rose up and his skin turned to sand and in an instant he was gone, whipping across the desert as fast as his gusts would carry him.
The Queen of the Dark Things stepped to the fire, sat down cross-legged in the dirt, smiled politely at the old witch, full of the knowledge that she could not see her.
The devil woman held up a hand dripping pulp, offering it to the Queen. “Plum?” she asked.
The Queen of the Dark Things shook her head. “I know better than that. I will not become one of your she-devils.”
With that the note of the song came to an abrupt halt, replaced by a chorus of ear-piercing howls.
“I will not call you Queen,” said Marm.
“I was hoping we could change that.”
“No.
We
can't.”
The Queen of the Dark Things put two stiff fingers between her lips and whistled shrilly.
Then from out of the dark came an army of shadows, kutji swooping in from all sides. They went for the she-devils, their single clawed hands rending their naked flesh. The howls turned to shrieks, terror-stricken devils batting futilely at their attackers. The night filled with the sounds of slaughter, of flaying skin and severed limbs.
Marm rose to her feet screaming. “No! Not my girls!”
“Then call me Queen.”
“No!”
“The creatures of the night belong to me now. You either join me or you join the campfires on the other side of the sky. Only you can end this.”
“No! I won't! I serve no one!”
“You serve me now.”
Marm listened as the she-devils she had collected over a thousand years begged for their lives, wincing as they cried out for their mistress to save them. Tears of blood formed in the corner of her hollow sockets, her fists balled up at her sides. “Save us!” they shouted. “Do something!”
And she did.
The devil woman fell to one knee, head bowed, arms out, palms extended to the sky. “My Queen,” she said. “Please make this stop.”
“Swear to me,” said the Queen of the Dark Things.
“I swear to you.”
“And only me.”
“And only you.”
With that, the Queen nodded and her shadows beat a hasty retreat, vanishing immediately back into the night.
The she-devils, what few remained, at once fell to their knees, sobbing, the blood of their sisters covering them from head to toe.
The Queen of the Dark Things rose to her feet, pointing sternly at Marm. “Your days of grinding plums are done. You will never again seduce another young girl to your fire. You will never again trick one into eating your pulp. And you will never again turn another little girl into one of your monsters. Cherish the devils you have, witch, for you will never make another.”
Marm nodded, knowing full well she had no other choice.
“When I call, and I will call, you come.”
“I will, my Queen.”
The Queen put a gentle hand on her shoulder and offered a soft smile. “I know,” she said. “I know.”
C
olby slammed back the last bit of whiskey, draining the glass dry. Then he stood up from his stool, cracking his neck from side to side.
“Colby,” said Yashar, hesitantly. “What are you doing?”
Colby popped his knuckles. “I'm not going to sit in here circling the damn wagons all day. If they were going to do something, they would have done it. Their little game has run its course.”
“They just want to scare you.”
“I was done being scared two whiskeys ago. Now it's time to have a talk. I'm going to march out there and tell them that I want no part of this. Whatever mess they're in, they can handle it themselves. I won't be bullied. Not by the likes of them.”
“If ever there was anyone
to
bully you, it would be exactly the likes of them. Don't let the fact that they haven't killed you make you think that they won't. Right now they think you're useful, not indispensable. If you go out there and tell them to fuck offâ”
“What?” asked Colby. “They might kill me? What good would that do?”
“It'd go a long way toward convincing the next guy to do exactly as they asked.”
“There is no next guy. You know that. There's a reason they came to me. I want to know what it is.”
“If they wanted you to know, they would have told you. Maybe it's for the best that you don't know.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Stay in here?”
“No,” said Yashar. “We should go out there. There's just no need to be an asshole about it. We'll talk. We'll find out what they want and then we'll find a very gentle way to tell them no.”
“And you think they'll take no for an answer?”
“Hell no. But we might be able to come up with a solution better than
go fuck yourselves and find someone else.
”
“All right then, we'll call that one plan B.”
“Can we slide it down to D? Maybe E?”
“Afraid not.” Colby made his way to the door.
“Hold up!”
Colby shook his head. “I've spent enough time in here. Let's go bust some heads.” He tossed back the inside door, waltzing into the cramped entry, then pushed wide the heavy metal door that opened into the alley.
The glare through the doorway was a bright, blinding blue, the world outside a hazy smudge slowly racking into focus. Colby squinted, imagining it made him look like Clint Eastwood. Instead he looked like a kid who had lost his glasses. He turned to face the street, fists clenched, reworking the scant dreamstuff around him into a crackling aura that popped and sizzled against the air.
He strode out toward the street, Yashar following close behind. Gossamer tore out of the door, catching up quickly, leaving no more than six inches between himself and Colby after that.
They reached the street, looked up, Colby with his arms out, taking the fight to
them
. And they saw nothing.
The city was empty of demons, not a sign that they'd ever been there. Traffic was normal, people made their way up and down the street, a couple trying hard not to make eye contact with the strange man with wild eyes and sweat-matted hair making as if he was about to talk to God. Everything was as it should be. The siege, it would seem, was over.
“They made their point,” said Yashar. “There was no other reason to stay.”
Colby sighed. “Yeah. They did.”
“So what now?” asked Gossamer.
“Now we need to find out what we're up against.”
“You mean . . .
her,
” said Yashar.
“That's exactly what I mean. I need to talk to someone who traffics in just the sort of things we're dealing with.”
“And where are you going to find someone like that?”
“The Limestone Kingdom.”
Yashar shook his head, dismissing him with a wave. “Colby, you can't go out there. Not now.”
“Don't worry,” said Colby. “I'll sober up first.”
R
hiamon the Gwyllion looked at least 140 years old. Her eyes were sunken, black, in a sea of wrinkles, her hair a strawlike white that could snap in a stiff breeze. A single horn curled, knobby and yellow, along the side of her face. She rasped as she breathed, her lungs gurgling, her throat phlegmy, constricted. She tugged at the knots in a goat's beard with a comb, her arms too weak to work it out. It looked as if she could expire at any moment, as if she couldn't possibly make it another night.
And yet, as she saw him, striding up the steep hill to her flock of goats, she aged further still. Colby Stevens was back. And nothing good could come of that.
Her skin went from pale to gray, her hair peeling away in layers. Wrinkles sagged further; breasts flattened against her stomach. The flap of skin on her neck dangling beneath her chin wiggled with the arthritic chattering of her teeth. The blood in her veins went cold, barely pumping through her weak, shriveled heart.
Rhiamon the Gwyllion was dying, the youthful vigor that had once sustained her drained by defeat, drowning in the fear that Colby would one day learn of what she'd doneâthe full extent of her involvement in Ewan's deathâand he would come for her. She was on the council that had chosen Ewan; she had aided his changeling doppelgänger and the redcaps that followed him; and she had all but entirely orchestrated the events that led to each of their deaths. Yet somehow, she'd managed to keep her involvement secret. But she always knew he would come. It seemed inevitable.
And here he was, approaching up the hill, golden retriever by his side, a dangerous, bold look in his eyes, as if he wasn't afraid of anythingâespecially not her. Terror gripped her. Pain seized her chest. Her eyes widened as she trembled.
This was it, she thought. This was how her several thousand years would come to an end.
“I've come for counsel,” said Colby, sitting beside her in the dirt. He pulled a comb from his pocket and began working the knot out of a beard of a nearby billy goat. Gossamer hung back, rigid and poised, watching over them.
“What?” she asked, her trembling hands steadying.
“Your counsel,” he said again. “I need your help.”
The fluid in her lungs evaporated, the skin around her eyes tightening ever so slightly. The gray of her skin flushed to a soft white. She stared at him, her jaw loose, her eyes as puzzled as they had ever been. “My help? However do you mean?”
“I know you have no reason to help me,” he said, struggling with a knot, the billy goat growing ever more frustrated with each pass of his comb. “But there is no one in the Limestone Kingdom as old, as wise, or as . . .”
“As what?”
“As . . . ruthless . . . as you. To traffic in such creatures as to know the one I seek.”
Rhiamon's eyes widened and she shed sixty years in mere seconds. She smiled, teeth swelling out from bloody gums. “The Queen,” she said. “The Queen of the Dark Things comes for you after all. She comes for her vengeance.”
“I didn't do what she thinks I did.”
Rhiamon cackled and lost another decade from her face. Her eyes were bright and beaming now, her hair still white, but full and lustrous. “That doesn't matter, Colby Stevens. Truth is irrelevant when the heart is at play. What we're afraid of, what we believe, those are the only truths when human frailty is involved. Whether you like it or not, you hurt her, Colby. You left her. Alone. With the dark things. And she will have her revenge.”
“And that's why I need your help.”
“Make a pact with one devil to stave off another? I never imagined you so desperate.” She pondered that for a moment. “No. I take that back. That's what you've always done.”
“I don't want to hurt her. But I have no idea what I'm up against.”
“So you've come to ask.”
“I've come to ask.”
“You've come to beg.”
Colby swallowed hard, the words choking in his throat. “I've come to beg.”
Rhiamon was twenty-five, her heart leaping in her chest, her skin radiant, the vibrant spark of life electrifying the air around her.
If Colby didn't know the hag within, it wouldn't take him long to fall in love with her. But he knew of the dark rot within her heart, the seething hatred that burned like an ulcer in her stomach. She was a living cancer, feeding off everything nearby.
“The Queen, she terrifies even me. I have lived several thousand years and I have never known her like.”
“So she's more powerful than me now?”
Rhiamon squinted, eyeing him from top to bottom and back again. “Don't speak to me about power as if you understand it, boy. You don't know what power is. You twiddle your fingers and deconstruct a thing in front of you and you think that's power. That's not power; that's ability. Power is another thing entirely. The Queen, she fears nothing. Her belief in herself is total. She knows nothing of doubt, never for a moment questions herself. She will stare you down and know the best of three different ways she will kill you if you answer her questions wrong. Not can. Will. The things of the night in the dreamtime listen to her without fail; they obey her every command. And they know the penalty for failure. She doesn't give second chances, and she only affords a swift death to those who fail despite their best efforts.