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snarp...But Not Without Major Revisions Of This Section I Don't Think.
The paranormal romance wherein the heroine is the Ancient Evil, and which is also Dwarf Fortress fanfic.
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GOD SAVE OUR WICKED QUEEN
-
Her existence has obtruded upon the history of Men and beasts for some two millennia. She has been a seer, a warrior, an artist, a slave, and a Queen - primarily, a Queen. She has ruled Men, in some proportion, for most of a thousand years all told.
She has changed little in that time. The Queen is always far-sighted, slow to anger, and quick to act. She surrounds herself, always, with clever advisers and powerful wizards and warriors, whom she calls her Dark Children. Her true children turn on her. She has never had a King. She has the power to make Men immortal.
It has been argued that the Queen's ascendance must be lived with, like the certainty of winter, and that the proper goal of statecraft is to minimize her damage. It has been argued that no thing which lives may live forever, and that the proper goal of statecraft is her death. And it has been argued, too, that we are not Men, and she is not our concern.
- from the memoirs of Enathime, last King of the Elves of the Silver Beech
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I'm personally an advocate of burying her in a hole.
- a remark alleged to have been made by the dwarf Joenwy Steelhelm shortly before her execution
-
"Men who seek the aid of one of my kind against another," said the Queen, her black eyes flickering as if she gazed into a flame, "Seldom prosper. Yesterday two Men did not prosper; today, one. My Dark Children killed one of them, and my son - with whom these Men thought to make party - killed the others."
"But should you wish to die, then tomorrow is as good a day as any. You will find my son's head in its usual place, but you will find his heart nowhere. Count your blessings. My own heart is merely stone."
The Queen did sometimes recycle turns of phrase; she'd said so very much in her long life that it was inevitable. But she always struck one as very topical and relevant: "It is childish to think that the new, the novel, the clean and bright and thin will ever defeat a darkness as ancient and heavy as mine." She'd first had occasion to say those words about nine hundred years ago, nearly immediately following the invention of the hand cannon.
Today it had to do with her preferred necromancer's cell phone, and some sort of alert tone that paralyzed one's cortical homunculus. The Queen apparently did not possess such an anatomical object, but her necromancer did. He had suffered no permanent injury, aside from the embarrassment of having forgotten the phone at a food truck and, upon regaining it, subsequently forgetting to set it to "silent" before entering the Queen's presence. Her chief of palace security had confiscated his phone, and also kicked him.
"To those who are loyal to me, I say, as always, this: you shall have my protection. And to those who rebel against me, I say this: lie to your families, hide from your lovers, and go to the ground. Nothing will save you, but perhaps you might save them."
She folded her hands.
Behind the cameraman, her chief of palace security applauded.
She frowned at the most obviously-named of her Children, and said to the sound guy, drawing her mound of white hair back over her shoulders, "Did your device hear that noise that he made?"
"No, your majesty."
"Then leave us." He did so as quickly as his immense sound guy dignity allowed. The lights went away, and her throne room darkened. The camera crew always looked silly here, under the carved black stone columns and dim red luminescence of the mossy ceiling. But then the Moth was in a black suit and sunglasses like he'd shown up for the wrong evil empire.
He said, "You're a ham, your majesty."
She said dryly, "I try, little boy." He wondered how old he'd have to be before she stopped calling him that. He'd be thirty next month, if he lived to next month.
He asked, "What were they up to with your kid's head?"
It was kept on public display in a temple with very sarcastic iconography - he'd called himself a god, which his mother had always found exasperating. Not many people ever saw the funny pictures she'd commissioned, as they knew better than to go take a look in the first place. The head still retained some of the powers the man had had when he was whole.
She said, "Oh - they thought to put it in a bag and bring it away and speak to it of war. Against me. Ordinary things. But my children have high standards; he didn't want a bag." She had already lost interest in these particular enemies. There would be more tomorrow. She added, "I sent you somewhere. Why are you still here?"
"You sent me to set fire to elves," he said cheerfully. "I rebelled."
"Lie to your family and hide from your lovers," she instructed, and turned her back to him. Obediently, he took up the slithering pale mass of her hair and began to braid it.
As always, the peculiar texture of it fascinated him. It was covered with tiny, crumbly-edged scales, like an old snakeskin, and all of it together weighed about twenty pounds. You could garrote a man with it, and they both had. Some strands were thicker than others, and some grew not out of her scalp, but her neck or ears, or other strands. Her skin shone like an alien metal, dark red and pearlescent, just a few shades paler than her wide whiteless eyes. She had no pores, no blemishes, no scars; impermeable.
She asked again, "Why are you here, little boy?"
He asked, "You remember what you wanted for your birthday two years ago?"
"The world." She made an impatient movement of one hand. He could not see her face, but it would be very still; she didn't waste expression on herself. "Always the world. Of *you,* I asked the creature who destroyed the dwarvish city of Nashoncog - the Hellbent. You were the only one of my Children who did not bring me my present." The Dark Children had heavy responsibilities, and the Queen's birthday present was among the heaviest.
Withdrawing a hand he'd cut on her to blot it on his sleeve, Moth corrected her, "I got you your Hellbent."
"I wanted a servant. You brought me a prisoner. A bloodied one full of rage, one who must be guarded at all times by two of my Dark Children. A constant drain on my treasury and my power." The Queen's voice turned like fall into winter; the temperature of the room dropped, and the thin light weakened. She could do things like that, with her voice, though she didn't often do them to him these days. "You misjudged your enemy, little boy. I wasn't pleased with you. I'm still not, when reminded. Why have you reminded me?"
"I want to try again," he said, making his voice light.
"Why?" She shrugged - a small, economical gesture. Physical language did not come naturally to her, and she got it over with quickly. "The forces that the Hellbent channel are old, and as stubborn in their chosen orbit as is this round world; they cannot be taken to leash. I tried it once, six hundred years ago, and I lost my capital city and nine of my Dark Children all in a single night. It took me nearly a hundred years to wrest back the throne from my idiot son. The Hellbent are far too dangerous. This one's killed fifty thousand."
He said in surprise, "I thought you liked that sort of stuff."
She understood sarcasm, but she usually chose to ignore it: "Killing fifty thousand dwarves? Yes. None of you, the youngest of my Children, has ever broken a city for me." Her voice was soft and dense with shadows. "This world of yours was different when I was in my prime, little boy. Destroyer of Cities - this was a *title* I would give. I remember the day that my rebellious son, knowing himself at last defeated, scoured the skies clean of clouds that his doomed orcish armies, ranged exhausted across the mountains, could watch in terror and awe as my Cold-Hands drowned their country of Runak in the sea. This, I think, is the only beauty the orcs know to this day... To name *you* Destroyer would shame Cold-Hands."
She'd killed Seglant the Cold-Hands herself.
He said flippantly, "Urban infrastructure's expensive now, your majesty. It's not productive knock modern cities down every time they annoy you. We've talked about this."
"Infrastructure." She shrugged again. "You mortals were spoiled under my worthless daughter's reign. It's good that I finally dealt with that girl... An effective ruler *must* have a servant whose mere presence in a land is a clear threat to its continued existence. A Piper, a Silver-Haired Child, or a Hellbent - one of those."
"So, you do still want your Hellbent," he concluded pleasantly, giving her her braid back. "You mind if I go up there for a visit?"
She turned and looked at him incuriously. "Why now, little boy?"
He handed removed two sheets of paper from his pocket. "Here. It's a report from the Dreamer that came in thirty-five minutes ago, and another from our observers along the Not-Runak-Anymore-Sea coast, fifteen minutes ago."
She read them both carefully, all the way through, without blinking her eyes. "...And you think that this changes things, in a Hellbent's eyes?"
He shrugged. "Worth a try. And I like giving you presents, you know."
She looked impassively at him. She said, "Go, then. But go cautiously. You're no Cold-Hands, but I want you alive." There was something oddly sweet about those large dark eyes, like a dog's - a lie.
He bowed. She was already walking away when he got his head back up. She was a busy woman.
-
The Queen's city, which she called just that - "my city" - and which other people moderately called Purgatory, was built in a circle around her stronghold Nel, which itself rested upon a dead cindercone volcano set improbably alone on a wide plain. It looked pretty much like the sort of place you'd find the Queen.
Nel was made of a dark stone which resembled gray hematite but was, according an off-handed remark she had once made, the emission of a massive beetle which ate hope. She'd won its services in some sort of eldritch card game during the period in which her son had cast her body into the *actual* Purgatory. Her soul he'd placed elsewhere, but it seemed that the rest of her could carry on without it. It was little things like that that had always made her the greatest of her monstrous family.
Whatever Nel was, rain and centuries had taken their toll on her towers, and they now looked a bit sunken and melted, with surprising large pitted marks like bubbles in places that got a lot of sun. To Moth this gave it an oddly comfortable-looking aspect, except for being so black.
In certain lights and from certain angles, Nel was subject to a kind of optical illusion. Portions of it seemed to become translucent, and its strange chambers and disturbing residents visible to those below who could not enter. He had seen it only once, half a lifetime ago, in a pale golden sunset at the end of a very long day. His sister had seen it first, and she had showed him the right way to hold his head. They had watched until the changing angle of the light made it black again.
It had seemed very beautiful to both of them, then; and it had been, he still believed, some sort of challenge.
In the present day it was a nice bright opaque morning, with lots of sun wasting itself on Nel's hot black towers. Moth took the outdoor route to his apartments, his feet ringing on the shining paths. Grim-faced servants in gray, scuttling here and there, saw Moth and avoided him; tradesmen and diplomats didn't bother. Most people didn't recognize him out of the uniform of the Dark Children, until he started burning things.
He'd better stop by his room and change. You felt more comfortable dealing with the Hellbent when you knew that the rest of the world saw you and flinched.
There were a lot of little courtyards and decorative nooks scattered around Nel - things the Queen had requested rather than things her beetle servant had wanted, he'd always assumed, though he'd never seen her stop to admire any of them. As he passed a small garden of velvet-gray moss and silver flowers, a woman and a bear stepped out from behind a statue of a dead Dark Child and startled him half to death. Goddamn elves.
"Has something happened?" asked the Lady Lenuse anxiously, her hand curled tight in her pet's fur. The bear, a hulking brown thing with too-intelligent eyes, glowered at him. The Lady Lenuse always looked anxious, and her bear always glowered. "I heard a strange voice in my ear, saying that I would not go to Tayoliririli today." He wished Nel didn't talk so damn much.
The Queen's original assignment to him had been to escort the Lady, an emissary of the free Elvish nation of the Silver Beech, on a tour of the somewhat-less-free Elvish enclave of Tayoliririli, which had taken a slight beating in its recent attempts to regain its sovereignty. The Queen wished that certain ideas be hammered into Lenuse's yellow head. He said, "Sorry. I've got stuff to do."
"But when will I see Tayoliririli?" she asked anxiously. "I wrote to Lord Avenema to say I would come this week."
"Stuff to do!" he said cheerfully. "Now, if you were to take the Queen up on her offer -"
Lenuse wrung her hands. It was easy to laugh at her, but unlike some Dark Children he might have named, the elf, at least, never descended to hysterics. The worst she ever did was the hand-wringing thing. "I cannot serve both your Queen and my people," she said unhappily. "I am here as an ambassador, not as a - as a gift."
He looked Lenuse over critically. He wasn't sure whether he'd take her as a gift. She wasn't bad-looking, though her waist-length hair was too flat and dry for it to make sense to call it "golden" or "honey-colored," and her green eyes weren't the kind you compared to emeralds, if you were being realistic. Her voice was nice enough, if you based your personal opinions on the sorts of sounds people made.
The Queen didn't, but she meant to have Lenuse. The elf woman was reputed to be one of the most powerful healing wizards alive, and the Queen had recently lost the only healer among her Dark Children to the orcs. None of those remaining had gotten a look at Lenuse in action yet, but they had been instructed to try. Moth'd been thinking about setting the bear on fire.
The bear growled at him, not liking the look on his face. He told it, "You don't get a vote. - Hey, you want to go someplace else? It'll be fun."
Lenuse studied his face warily. "Where?"
"Say yes and I'll tell you."
The bear growled an objection. Someone beside him said, "Little bug."
"What?" he asked, annoyed. "Go bite somebody." Wolfden Sharptooth had come up behind him. The Old Dog was partway between his wolf and human forms, a shattered-looking creature bent over and covered unevenly with scrappy gray fur, his face warped and elongated. He would be easier on the eyes in a couple of days, when both moons were full and he was all wolf. The high-collared, severe uniform of the Dark Children fit him badly; he had seven different ones, tailored for the different phases of his transformation, but Moth thought he never looked quite right until he reached wolf form.
"Have you Her permission to take it places?" he asked. Lenuse tried to look haughty, but mostly only looked sad, like usual. "This may not please Her."
"It'll be educational," said Moth carelessly. "You can go ask Her if you want."
"No," said Sharptooth, smiling at him toothily. "You take your own risks. Where do you go?"
"To see your best friend."
The Hellbent was not the Old Dog's best friend. His furred throat vibrated with a soundless growl. "Hopeless," he said. "You should not bother. I shall kill it if you bring it back here."
"Ask Her if it's okay first," he said, unimpressed. "Hey, you're on your wolf-period - you smell too bad to use your hellsteed right now. Let me have it."
"Why? What did you do with your own?"
"I don't remember. Guess."
"I guess that there was fire." Sharptooth grinned at him. Moth shrugged impatiently. "You are an expensive pet, burning so many of the Queen's nice things. Will the elf loan the bear to me in trade?"
The bear huffed. "I will not," Lenuse said to Sharptooth with a frown. "And I have not yet agreed to go anywhere with him. *Who* is he going to see?"
"A monster which it once failed to tame," said Sharptooth, still smiling. "We keep it caged."
Moth said, "Sure. You can feed it breadcrumbs and make friends, Lenuse, it'll be cute."
Lenuse looked at him suspiciously. "Why are you going to see this monster?"
"To see if it's ready to be tamed yet."
Lenuse knit her brows. "...and if it is tamed, you will no longer... cage it?"
"That's the plan," Moth said, grinning at her. She looked at him reproachfully. Elves had a deep, instinctive distaste for imprisonment, even of monsters. They killed them or sent them on their way.
"Very well. We go," she said to the bear. The bear made a grumbling noise. To Moth she said, "I shall saddle him."
"I don't think the bear can keep up with a hellsteed," Moth told her. "We've got six hundred miles to cover today. I'll find you -"
Lenuse said calmly, "My Biss is very swift. Are you not, dear Biss?" The bear rumbled impatiently at her. He guessed he trusted her judgment on that - Lenuse's people'd fought wars against hellsteeds, and usually they'd won. That was why the hellsteeds didn't have heads anymore.
"Do what you want, I guess. Meet me at the western stair in twenty minutes." He watched the elf walk off with her bear, content enough. He'd might as well get a look at how that damn animal acted outside of Nel, given that he put the odds at fifty-fifty the thing'd go for his throat someday. And someone always got hurt in a confrontation with a Hellbent. He might finally get to see Lenuse's power.
"You take risks," pointed out Sharptooth accurately, following him.
A few hundred yards down Nel's windowless black sides they could see the courtyard of Purgatory's central temple, full of travellers there to observe Her daughter's creations. Moth picked out a few elves by their height, and some pale dwarves clustered in the shade. The roar and sweaty scent of the place drifted up, dulled by distance, like the ocean. A young man with chalk-covered hands was slowly scaling the wall, apparently invisible to those below him. But Moth observed, like the color of his hair, the idea of fire on him; he had explosives. Moth could see things like that.
He leaned over the edge and opened his hand, letting a little flame fall, a little slower than gravity-acceleration. The boy had time to get out of the way, if he wasn't too stupid too look up. "It's fine."
"You may lose the elf without gaining the Hellbent," he said.
"I don't think so," he said calmly, watching his target's clothes take light. The tiny figure tumbled, like a toy, and suddenly burst. He hadn't looked up. Idiot. "I feel pretty good about this. I think I'll get them both."
"You think too little," muttered Sharptooth, climbing up a stone too peer over the edge. "Who was that that you burned?"
"I don't know, someone. I'm always thinking."
"You think about fire," said Sharptooth disgustedly. "Things do not go your way, or they bore you - you burn them. You could take more time with the elf, but you don't, because she does not interest you. So you force the issue by making her see what we do. She will refuse the Queen, because of you."
"Maybe." The guards were on their way over. It was pretty convenient how, any time Moth set fire to somebody in Purgatory, a bunch of guards came running. The Queen had instituted the program a few years ago, so he wouldn't be inconvenienced by the terrible burden of cleaning up after himself, she'd told him. "I don't think so, though. She knows what we do. I'm just going to be honest with her."
"You are never honest," Sharptooth said disgustedly. "Go then and frighten the elf and rage at the monster. When the Queen discards you, you will deserve it."
"Historically that's usually how it's worked, yeah," he said. "Don't you worry about me."
"I never do," said Sharptooth, his teeth clicking. "You must worry about yourself." And limped off on all fours, muttering disgustedly to himself.
Moth really tried not to worry about himself. That was a hole with no bottom.
-
Six hundred miles later, he reached the end of the sunlight and the End of the World at about the same time. They conspired together to turn the sky the color of a rusty pipe. The End of the World was a hilly place, a bruised violet color in the swampy valleys, velvet gray on the hilltops. None of the thin plants grew higher than his shoulders. The reluctant copses of spindly trees on some of the hills were not quite as tall as the grass in the puddles.
Lenuse perched swaying atop her bear, pale and drained. The bear, by contrast, looked as fresh as it had that morning, and as pissed at him. Moth hated that stupid bear.
Lenuse asked uncertainly, "What is that?" The rough oval stone on which the Queen had built the Hellbent's prison, ninety feet across each way and twenty high at the apex, looked like some kind of mistake.
Moth said cheerfully, "That right there would be my little monster's cage." He hopped off Sharptooth's hellsteed to meet the figure waiting for them in front of the little house below the stone.
The Dreamer, one of the two Dark Children his Queen was presently wasting to guard Moth's mistake, was nearly eight feet tall, with a wide face cratered like the moon with scars, and one broken tooth jutting out on the right side of his mouth. Some young Orcs, before maturity made their jaws heavy and their skin rock-hard, could nearly pass for the elves whose dead parts they'd been made from. The Dreamer had never been one of them. Sarg's skin was the color of drying grass, his hair a tangled rust-orange mane going halfway down his back.
He was out of uniform, in muddy jeans and a grayish t-shirt whose original color was unidentifiable, and no boots over his big clawed feet. He stood beside Moth with the posture of a puppet with some cut strings, and hard tired bruises below his eyes.
Lenuse, out of earshot, was looking at them curiously. It was a little hard for most people to believe that the Moth - narrow, of ordinary height and smooth brown skin, and possessed of a thoroughly unmemorable and human face - could have much to do with the Dreamer, the Old Dog, the Displaced One, or the others she'd met. Most of them were actually closer to being human than he was, but he usually looked the most like one.
The Dreamer told him glumly, "Did not want to go past the barrier after those damn things crawled under. Decided to wait, when you said were coming."
"Sarg, for fuck's sake, are you or are you not one of the Wicked Queen's Dark Children? What are you making me do this for?"
"Not one of the *real* Dark Children, me," he said grumpily. "One of the ones sits in a safe damn *room* -"
"What's your room look like?" asked Moth, peering up at the little black box atop the stone that had been the Hellbent's unwilling home for two years. "I've never seen it."
"You keep your mouth shut. Cannot fight a damn Hellbent, me."
Moth shrugged. *He* didn't want to try it a second time, either, but with luck the Hellbent in question wasn't sure of that. "Fine. You can come open the outer barrier for me. I want to save my strength in case the inner one breached."
Sarg followed him gloomily, his bare feet dragging in the mud. As they approached the prickling silver line on the ground that marked the outer barrier, he stopped.
He said again, "Cannot fight her."
Moth eyed him. "So've you been *talking* to the ancient evil, Sarg?
Sarg looked away. "...some."
Moth restrained a sigh. He said firmly, "Okay, don't. She's not what she looks like." He'd learned that lesson two years ago. "You want me to switch with you for a while?"
"...Queen cannot spare you," he said uncertainly.
"She can't spare you, either," said Moth sharply. He was getting sick of the constant reminders of the goddamn mess he'd made. "Go get your things packed and leave. - Tell the elf to help you. Either I'll be down in half an hour or we're all dead."
Sarg stood rooted to the spot, uncertain whether to be hopeful or suspicious. The Dreamer should never have been sent here. The Hellbent was not a stupid woman. By now she might have figured out some uses for a jailer who hated himself.
Sarg said finally, "Good luck, then." He kicked a hole in the barrier, and Moth hopped through before it could close itself.
The Hellbent's magic hit him like a wave crashing. He heard Sarg swear, and realized he was burning. He put it out impatiently.
The air was different in here, warmer, wet, and a little moldy. Mushrooms grew everywhere, as dense as the grass, and he kicked up little clouds of spores as he approached the stone. The light seemed clearer, and the colors were richer.
There was something simultaneously overwhelming and comforting in a Hellbent's power - like a huge dog pressing its paws against your chest, or a bonfire. The first time he'd felt it, he'd liked it. Later he'd learned better.
At the base of the stone, he kicked his shoes off and left them in the slimy grass. You couldn't track any dirt up to her door. She'd nearly escaped that way once.
He climbed the rough path cut into the stone to her cell, about half-prepared to die. He had no real idea whether the inner barrier had held. Trying to find its paltry magic in hers was like trying to sift a pinch of flour out of a pound of salt.
He reached the top and peered through the carved stone bars. They opened incongruously onto a tidy dwarvish sitting room.
It was about the same as he remembered it: a low dwarf-sized blue sofa with a couple cushions; a reading lamp, switched off; bookshelves, fuller than they'd been when he'd last come here, and there was one more of them; a wooden desk with some notebooks scattered around it and a vase in the middle; no flowers. The Hellbent was an important prisoner, and the Queen let her buy things, within reason. Nothing of raw stone, of course. There were two paintings on the walls now instead of one, but they were both of elephants, and he couldn't figure out which one was new. The door to her bedroom was closed, the door to her kitchen was open. It looked very ordinary.
Joenwy Steelhelm had spent most of her life in an excruciatingly uninteresting manner: went to school, went to school some more, taught history at a dwarvish university, married and divorced another professor very quickly - he'd quit, she'd stayed.
She'd never bothered to hide that she was a geomancer of some kind. Her people had just thought she must be weak.
He'd thought so, too.
Since then, he had done some research on the woman he'd mishandled so badly, whose stubborness might still get him killed. It seemed she had not been entirely contented with her quiet little life. Moth's life had been a little too exciting, which was why he now worked for the Queen; he envied the one she'd lived. Well, maybe she did, too, these days.
The Hellbent had been just short of her own thirtieth birthday when she'd punched a hole through her city.
He called, "Hellbent?"
She said, "What."
"Where are you?" he asked, because she sounded close - and then she raised her head, and he realized she had been sitting on the sofa, very still. He'd forgotten how easily geomancers could disappear into the scenery.
Steelhelm stood up stiffly, and he was surprised, all over again, by how normal she looked. She was a pale-pink little dwarf woman, heavyset and slow-moving, with dull black hair grown midway down her back now. He could never remember what color her eyes were; brown or something.
The immensity of her power hung over them like a mountain. She dragged her battered wooden desk chair over to the bars and dropped heavily into it. "So did you bring me a goddamn souvenir, Obviousname?"
"Sorry, I was in a hurry." He saw now that his eyes had adjusted that there were a few gouges on the chair and on the tile floor, deep and clawlike. He said, "What happened?"
She shrugged. "Ask Sarg."
"He didn't see much. He says he was doing something to the outer barrier when they showed up."
She scratched her greasy hair. "He didn't see because he wasn't here. He's a greenwitch, and the soil here's bad. Sometimes he goes and roots himself in a vegetable garden somewhere for a day or two."
He cocked his head at her. "You're tattling on your favorite jailer, Hellbent?"
Moth had guarded her the first six months, as punishment for his sins; neither of them had been very professional about things. Since then Sharptooth and Sarg had taken turns. Sharptooth, characteristically, had bitten her. He could see the jagged gray scar across the back of her right hand.
She said, "You're getting rid of him anyway. You get rid of people you can't use."
She sounded like she wanted to make the earth swallow him up. He wasn't too worried about that. She didn't go in for small individual acts of vengeance. She played for larger stakes.
He said placidly, "You got it. So what happened?"
It took her a second to put her anger away - he could see the effort in her pale face - but she did it. She always did. Self-control was part of being whatever she was.
"See the hill out there?" She pointed, wincing when her finger brushed the invisible barrier. He'd helped make it, and like everything he made, it burned. The bars were mostly there to discourage her from an obvious bad decision.
She said, in a drowsy voice that made the air stop moving, "There's a black spot on top of it now, but before, there were trees. The leaves all started falling off them about a week ago. At that time shadows began to appear on the ground, in places where there was nothing to cast them. They were not conspicuous until they began to move, and then their voices became audible. They listed the names of flowers with little smell and birds without voices, and not much else, at first."
Able to breathe again, he did so, then said, "Sarg didn't notice all this? With the - talking about birds, and stuff?" Moth's powers were more straightforward than this stuff. He just burned.
"He hasn't come up for about two weeks. He calls to make sure I'm still here." She dug a battered black cell phone out of her pocket; it called only to the guardhouse, and was intended for "emergencies." Moth was not, himself, certain what that word meant in a context of a ticked-off Hellbent. "I don't think it's obvious unless you're close. Is he pretty far back?"
"- Yeah, the guardhouse is a ways back," Moth said, surprised. "I keep forgetting you can only see in one direction."
She looked at him like something she wanted to crush between big rocks again. He grinned at her.
After a long moment she put it away and shrugged, leaning back in her chair again. "Last night the shadows stood up and spoke more loudly, and the ground broke apart where they'd been lying."
"Is that how you hurt your arm? Some polite conversation with some shadows?"
She glanced down at the lump of the bandage under her loose sleeve. Moth'd made sure she was given first aid supplies - though as the intention was allow her to patch herself up after failed escape attempts, they were heaviest on burn treatment. She said in her ordinary voice, "Yeah, assholes moved faster than I expected."
"And you never felt like pointing any of this out to Sarg?" he asked sharply. Purely professionally speaking, he didn't like the idea of dead things moving in with his special prisoner and threatening her. He thought he'd made the place very secure.
She shrugged. "I made them leave. Your thing didn't burn them," she pointed out, disinterested professional criticism. "They just kept going."
He'd been standing too long, and he was tired. He sat down on the rough stone and leaned against her bars; the barrier didn't care about things outside going in, only things inside going out. He heard her shift her chair back away from him. He said, "They're coming from the Hill, of course. Do you know about the Hill? It's the only thing north of here before the ice. People walk up it, a hundred or so each year, when they never want to come back down."
"I know the Hill," said Steelhelm, her voice sleepy and Hellbent again. "Someone came back down once. To warn that any living creature who used magic to blur the lines between life and death, would find the lines redrawn sharply."
He applauded. He loved women who said spooky things.
"So I guess your Queen shouldn't have been raising the fucking dead," she commented, mortal again.
His fist clenched involuntarily, and he felt her sharp eyes on it. He *knew* that Sarg and Sharptooth hadn't known about that. How the hell had she found out?
He said after a while, "You know, Hellbent, that this was the only place on earth that we could find to safely imprison you?"
"Yeah. Sarg said it was a meteorite," she said. "All I know is it doesn't hear me when I talk." Her voice was studiously flat when she said it. He wondered, as he often had when he was her jailer, if it hurt a Hellbent to live in an unnatural place like this. Or a dwarf, for that matter.
"It's not from here," he agreed. "The stone here was formed on another world, a cold and airless one, where no living flesh ever lived or died. You have no power over it. The Queen sent me to check out several sites, but this stone here is the only one on earth with a low enough concentration of living soil to confine you."
"Sorry for the trouble."
He said, "And now the Dead are coming here. And very soon we'll have no place to store you." He shut his eyes. "Now, remind me of something - what sort of people do I get rid of?"
He heard her shift in her chair.
"When are you going to start being *useful* to me, Hellbent?"
"You could let me go, you know, jackass," she said sharply. She was fully mortal now, and furious. "I don't care about your Queen. She *never* mattered to me - *none* of you did. I had work to do, and I still do. You've got no idea how much danger you're putting the world in keeping me -"
He said impatiently, "We've gone over this. You're the only Hellbent alive. The Queen's got to be the one who has you."
"No one else's gonna get me, the whole world thinks you fucking incinerated me two years ago. If you let me go, I'll walk out of here, drop down into the caverns, and no one will ever hear from me again," she snarled. "That's all it takes. You stop wasting your time and mine."
He just shook his head, "You know, maybe you think you could do that. Just walk away from us, after what we've done to you. I mean, sure, I hear there are people like that in the world... But me, I'm the suspicious type. I let you go, and I spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder." He yawned and got to his feet, stretching. "I like my peace of mind. I'm not going to let you do that to me."
"So you've got two options. I'm giving you one last day to pick one. Think about it."
Then, tired out, he sat down again.
After a minute she pointed out neutrally, "You know, usually when the bad guy says shit like that, he leaves his victim alone to think about it. It's a psychological thing."
"You're no victim, Hellbent, and it's been a long day. Can you make me some coffee?"
"Yeah, probably." She got over things quickly. He really didn't want to kill her.
-
Jo was washing the coffee pot when the phone rang. She jumped, and it shattered against one side of the metal sink, suddenly and completely, not a single shard larger than her finger.
She had the feeling that the glass had been waiting for this for a long time. Objects that were close to stone and dirt always felt warm to her, and many seemed to have thoughts. She lifted her hands away slowly, examining the dripping soap for blood. It felt like the sort of day that she'd hurt herself.
It wasn't because of the dead - she knew about that. It was because of the human lying down outside. She'd known he'd be the one to come back with an ultimatum, if anyone did. She'd hoped he'd get himself killed first. He made her too angry. She didn't always trust herself, and the times when she was angry, she trusted herself least of all. Anger was a pure sort of thing. Jo was most comfortable with things of the other sort.
She picked the phone up with her hands still wet. "Yeah?"
"Is the Moth with you? Can he - talk to me?"
Sarg's deep voice was tense - she could picture him, rubbing the back of his neck with his right hand. Before, that had generally been something he'd done when he was worried about the other Dark Children getting mad at him. Today, he was scared she'd killed his boss. Well, that was nice. At least one person here was scared of her.
"Yeah, he's here," she said, drying her left hand on her pants and switching to it. "Hang on."
"What's he doing?" Sarg demanded suspiciously. "Is he with you? There's been a message."
She considered the implications of those questions for a split second. "- wait, what do you *think* he's doing?"
He made some kind of snarly noise she couldn't interpret. Orcs did a lot of that. She wondered if he'd started doing the neck-rubbing thing on purpose, because he didn't want to scare members of smaller species. "Prison guard" wasn't a good career path for Sarg.
The Moth called from the ground outside, "Is that for me?"
She'd thought he was asleep out there. She walked over to the door. "Yeah. He's got some kind of message -"
"From the Queen," Sarg interjected unnecessarily.
"From the one I'm going to bury in a hole."
The Moth said impatiently, "Yeah, well, he can tell you or he can come up here. I'm tired."
She repeated, accidentally in nearly the same tone of voice, "Either tell me or come here, he says."
"- But what's he going to *do* with you?" asked Sarg, sounding a little dazed.
"- why are you asking *me* that?" she asked blankly. "Do you want me to forward that on to him? How's he supposed to *answer*?"
The Moth said, "What's he asking you?"
She added, "He's asking what you're asking me." She wondered why she was helping the guy who was going to kill her scare the guy who was going to let him. Well, she was the ancient motherfucking evil in the room - she was probably duty-bound to take a monster over a coward.
"No," Sarg said confusedly, she wasn't sure to what. "I'll read it."
"Fine," she said.
The Moth said curiously, "What was he asking that you made that face, Hellbent?"
Jo ignored him; the Orc read to her, and like a good girl she repeated it: "My spies among the Orcs of Runak have confirmed it, and so now there is no doubt: a new island has arisen within Orcish waters, and an army of the dead is being raised thereon. It is not known whether these are the Orcs' dead, nor whether the Chieftan Rath did choose to raise them. The ambassador has denied knowledge, but will be questioned more thoroughly. From Rath himself, there is no word. Ogter has graciously given it to us to know that he does not much like the dead to walk, and believes that it was I who raised them." Who's Ogter?"
The Moth asked, "Was that part you or Sarg?"
"That was me."
"Ogter's Rath's heir. He was named last winter, and he's nineteen and wants to, you know - enslave all the humans, eat all the meat, collect all the interspecies concubines. Maybe he wants to repopulate Runak, doesn't realize orcs are sterile? - Seriously, Rath's not a dumb guy, I just *can't* figure out why he picked this kid."
"You are in an amazing fucking position to be questioning other political leaders' choices," she said.
So, the dead were rising in other places, too. It wasn't surprising; one resurrection always led to three plagues of the dead. It was the law of the ground. She wondered where number three was going to be.
She put the phone back to her ear. The orc on the line was saying unhappily, "- ignore me."
She told Sarg, "I'm not fucking ignoring you. Back up to "who raised them.""
Sarg said, "That was it. Is he -"
She told the Moth, "That was it."
The Moth said, "Ask him if the Queen's called me back?"
"He wants to know if -"
Sarg said, "There was nothing about him."
She relayed that.
"I'll be down in a while, Sarg. Pack and go home. Hang up, Hellbent."
Her jailer was complaining. She hung up on him. She stuck the phone in her pocket and ignored it when it buzzed again. "You're sending him home?" she asked warily.
"I get rid of people I can't use," the Moth reminded her. "What was he asking you about?"
Jo looked at him and thought, as she often did when dealing with him, about childhood social development. Bullies with a posse went for someone who acted like they didn't need to be in the posse - somebody too confident. Bullies without a posse went the other way and shot at the easiest target. Her personal bully'd been taking shots at his subordinate, and now he was going at her. He felt all alone. *He's in trouble,* she decided, pleased.
Out loud, she said, "He wanted to know what you were going to do with me."
"Call him back and explain that I'm going to have rough sex with you." He smiled up at her.
She said, "So what's the etiquette? Do you get paid up *front*, or do I just leave some of the local currency on the dresser?"
He sighed and got to his feet. "You just love to hurt my feelings. I'll go make sure he leaves."
"Take your time," she said. She headed back to the kitchen to clean up the glass.
If she could get one goddamn toe on some real dirt - or even if those damn dead things had been solid enough to track some *mud* up - Fuck everything, of course they hadn't been. She didn't have that kind of luck.
To do her work, she would need a connection to the living earth beneath this dead stone. She'd had one once. The wolf-thing, Sharptooth, hadn't wiped one of his paws carefully enough one day, and had accidentally laid a thin line of dirt from the ground to her doorstep. She'd been cautious with it, probing with long tendrils of soil for the best line of attack.
They'd caught her at it within three hours; the wolf had bitten her for embarrassing him. She never saw the second of her guards, but after that day, she that it existed. Someone who was always watching, and never slept.
She'd decided that if she ever got a line again, even for a split-second, she'd bury her entire prison underground immediately and worry about little details like oxygen later. The Queen's people were smart and fast. If she ever had another chance, she'd have to make do with being stronger.
If she had a chance within the next week. Maybe zombies would show up here next. Zombies didn't wipe their feet.
*Your life has probably taken a wrong turn somewhere when you're praying for a zombie attack.*
She dropped the remains of her coffeepot in the trash and abandoned her life by the side of the road. Then she went to take a shower. She'd better look her best for the zombies.
-
Her jailer called cheerily, "I'm home!"
Jo, sitting at the kitchen table, glowered at the door. She'd changed into her pajamas already; she'd decided he wasn't coming back. She called, "I'm eating."
"What?"
"Grilled cheese sandwiches. You want one?"
"Thank you, Hellbent, I'd love one."
She carried the plate out of the kitchen to the doorstep. She felt a low pulse of hatred, as always, at the sight of someone standing outside. He stuck his hand through the bars, and she dropped a sandwich into it.
He withdrew it and asked curiously, "Do you feed Sarg? Does he have mommy issues about you?"
"He has trouble eating the processed stuff," she said. "He'll drink tea." She didn't think people's mommy issues applied to a Hellbent. Hellbents were the opposite of that.
"Poor baby," said the Moth, sitting down cross-legged on the stone to eat. He was barefoot again. Jackass. "What sort of food are you getting now, anyway? Aside from cheese and bread, I mean."
She said, dropping grumpily into her chair, "Same menu as when you were here. I told them to stop sending a couple things."
"You're so picky. And you got a new bookshelf?"
She looked at it warily. "Queen's Birthday present from the fucking Queen. Or, I think it was from her. It came with some books about her." The new shelf, against the wall just to the right of her cage's door, had been there when she woke up on the Queen's Birthday a couple months ago. It wasn't wood, like the others; it was made from the same stone as her prison. It was a warning.
"From her," he agreed, reaching in and dropping the bread crusts on the floor in a successful attempt to piss her off. "Did you read them?"
She had. She didn't have a lot to do. "Is she really the same person?"
He laid down on the ground. "Yes."
"Why do you believe that?"
"Physical resemblance, patterns of speech, patterns of behavior. Certain skills..." He yawned. "I wondered about it when I was a kid. But I've killed a lot of weird things for her, and I've seen what happens when she gets hurt. She can't be killed."
Jo thought of the strange-looking woman with the randomly-selected facial expressions she'd seen on television. "That woman on TV's just an actress, right?" She didn't look like anything Jo'd every seen, but then non-dwarves weren't really her area of study.
"No, that's her." He grinned. "Yeah, she's like a bad actress playing herself. I was just telling her that this morning. I think she's bored with her peacetime persona. She talks about going to war a lot lately."
"Yeah? Maybe I don't want to help her with that."
He stretched out on the dark stone, his smile sleepy. "Then don't."
"...and what happens then?"
"Then you're not useful to me, Hellbent."
She said, "Yeah. I understood that. I guess what I'm asking is, what are your fucking plans for the next day?"
He opened his eyes and looked at her with cold deliberation. He freed one hand from behind his head and held it palm-up above his chest. A flame shot up from it, clean and blue-hot.
He said quietly, "You become one of the Queen's Dark Children, and swear to serve her for the rest of your life. Otherwise, in twenty-four hours, you will burn."
She said, "And if I promise and then run away? I can do that, you know. I can go places where nothing else can survive."
His dark eyes locked on hers, flat and disturbing. He said quietly, "You'll wish you'd burned." He stretched out and closed his eyes again. "Besides the fact that you're going to die, Hellbent - the way I understand it, anyway, a geomancer's first duty is to prepare the earth so that the dead sleep quietly within. Even a geomancer of your personal inclinations, I'm guessing. If the dead don't sleep, the earth is troubled. Some of the dead are awake. This isn't just about what you want."
"Who'd your Queen bring back?" she asked. "Why'd she do it?"
"It was the weekend, the internet went down, Sharptooth'd chewed up her knitting bag," he said impatiently. "That'll be your business once you've made your vow."
"See, there's this thing "pattern recognition." She's raised the dead, and that kind of fucking offends me. There's no reason I see that she won't make me do other things that fucking offend me."
"Yeah, she makes her accountants do pretty offensive things, too. The janitors and the pizza place also facilitate all that doing of evil deeds that we do. But the accountants and pizza guys can't lay all these damn undead running around. You can. I think you better get to it."
"Maybe they'll kill all the fucking orcs and go back to bed," she said flatly.
"We'll see! You've got a day. I'll let you know if I hear back about that." He turned his head like he'd heard something. "Oh, yeah, I brought you a new friend. She's going to feed you breadcrusts and domesticate you."
"Why the fuck did you kidnap an elf?"
"I didn't kidnap her, she wants to make *friends*. She's waving at me, I'm going to let her in." He formed a ball of fire between his hands, and she jumped back from the heat. He hurled it down at the forcefield. She felt faintly, through the muffling effect of the inner field, the outer breaching. He commented, annoyed, "She's bringing her bear up. I don't know why that thing's got to go everywhere with her, I think she even sleeps with it."
"She's got a war bear? Those things are expensive."
"Yeah, I only hang out with elves who are pretty much loaded. Hey, Lenuse! You've got to wipe your feet or you'll definitely die. Purification ritual, or something. The bear has to do it, too."
After a moment, a blonde head came into view, then the rest of the woman, then a huge brown bear, which appeared to have actually stopped to wipe its feet. The elf said to the Moth, frowning, "That house is not suitable for two people and a bear."
"Yeah, I guess you'll have to sleep outside. Lenuse, this is the Hellbent, she's the avatar of unspecified ancient forces of darkness, she killed fifty thousand people. Hellbent, this is Lenuse. Sometimes she probably sings to wild birds and they bring her jewels."
The elf corrected him, "They bring flowers and herbs, as is appropriate. You -" She looked at Jo, her brow knitted. "You... It has been widely reported that he executed you. There was a video taken." She turned to look at the Moth suddenly, surprised. "Then that was the shapeshifter Dark Child, Butterfly! She was reported dead some time before -"
"Butterfly's dead," the Moth told her briefly. "The Hellbent lived, obviously."
Lenuse looked at her - an intense look, disconcerting in its complete honesty. The bear was looking at her more narrowly, like it was trying to figure out if it could take her. It rumbled a comment at Lenuse, who looked back at it with an unreadable look on her thin face. She said after a moment, "...You have no scars. Yet you were badly burned."
Jo didn't think she remembered that. She shrugged.
The bear made another remark. Lenuse said, "Yes, you did tell me - so, someone healed her. Yet I have been told that there is none with my ability, among the Dark Children. - what happened to the one who did this?" she asked the Moth, her voice cool. "Did they flee, disgusted at being made to save one such as this? Or did she kill them? - Excuse me, dwarf," she said, nodding to her politely, "But my people would not have revived you. There is no penance for what you did."
"Yeah, that's what I hear," said Jo, rubbing her eyes. "Why'd you bring me an elf, Obviousname?"
"Hey, *she* said she wanted to come."
"You told me there would be a monster," Lenuse objected petulantly. There's such a thing as a straight line that works best left alone.
The Moth had laid down again and shut his eyes. He said, "You can leave if you're bored. Go build, like, a dwelling out of sticks and leaves."
The bear grunted disgustedly at him. Lenuse said coolly, "I don't like you. Come, Biss." The bear gave Jo a last suspicious bear look, then followed its mistress back down the side of the stone.
Jo asked, "Who's Butterfly?"
He said, "She's dead now. - hey, there aren't elf geomancers, are there?"
"There are, but they all suck."
"She's just jealous she can't be cool like you," he said reassuringly. "- can she? Or are you ancient evil types different from regular geomancers somehow?"
"Somehow. I'm pretty sure the Hellbent's always been a dwarf, though," Jo said.
He opened his eyes and looked at her curiously. "Wait, so can there only be one of you a time?"
She felt very tired suddenly. "You idiots don't even know what I am."
He shrugged. "You can throw big rocks around and get rid of the undead. That's enough for the Queen. I'm just curious."
He didn't need to know. "It is the law of the ground," she said for the ground. "There must always be One."
"It's neat how you do that echo-ey-voice thing," he said. "So what if another Hellbent showed up? Do you have to fight her?"
"Apparently your Queen's got some books. I bet there's one about Hellbents. Go read it."
"It said you grew from Hellseeds. What was that like?"
"Dwarves don't grow from *seeds,"* she said impatiently. "- Is the elf right? Did you assholes lose whoever it was that fixed me up?"
He raised the places where his eyebrows should have been. "You don't remember her? Great big green orc woman?" Jo didn't remember. "Yeah, well, I guess she kept you asleep most of the time. Her name was Maelga. Getting you into storage here was just about the last thing she did for the Queen."
*"Did* I kill her?" asked Jo. It bothered her. Somewhere inside her, she must remember a person named Maelga, because the idea of hurting her was unpleasant.
"Close." He smiled with teeth. Whatever it was, he was still upset about it. She must have done something.
She said, "And you're gonna try and replace your orc friend with an elf who hates you?"
"Maelga hated me, too," he said. "It's not my job to be likeable. It's my job burn women's flesh off."
"Damn, your Queen really sent the right motherfucking pyromaniac for the fucking job. I am converted to your sociopathic cause. It was that sentence right there that did it."
"Yeah, we're doing well going into day one of your deathwatch. I'm pleased, personally. Now, I'm going to go back down there and make dinner, maybe threaten the elf a little to round out my day. You need anything? Can I pick some of these awful goddamn mushrooms for you?"
"Yeah, gather me a basket of plump helmets, if you can tell them from the avenging angels."
"I can't."
"Then fuck off, who needs you."
-
The next morning, Jo woke up and wandered out to change her bandage to find a bear sitting outside with a basket of mushrooms. She said to the bear, "Where did you even find a basket?"
The bear opened one eye, huffed at her, and closed it again. "Yeah, I know, that's definitely the biggest problem with this situation." She walked over and knelt to examine the basket. "These are actually juvenile tower-caps. Mildly toxic and too woody for me to bite through with my flat omnivore teeth."
Its failure to competently pick mushrooms notwithstanding, the bear had nonetheless wiped its feet, so she retreated back to the bathroom. Might as well clean up before your execution.
The elf was there when she came back out, sitting barefoot and cross-legged beside the drowsing bear and scratching behind its ears. The basket was sitting overturned behind her. Jo said, "Did you pick those? Were you trying to poison me or feed me? Good try, whichever it was, you're about halfway there."
"I'm afraid that I'm unfamiliar with these species," she said. "How is it that they come to grow in this place? I judge them to be subterranean varieties."
"There's about the right level of light and moisture here for them, and Obviousname or someone brought my clothes. They would've been loaded with spores."
The elf's ears folded back in surprise. "Is this density of growth typical?"
"In places where I'm living, yeah. They'd normally be all over the floor and like, in my fucking bed, but something's keeping them out. Mold doesn't even grow on bread in this fucking rock."
"I see. Your power draws these simple organisms to you, that they may die and decay, to create living soil for you to control," said Lenuse thoughtfully. "Of course, the Queen's servants would not permit this. They are careful people, regardless of appearances. For what reason do you think the Moth has brought me to this place?"
"Eh," said Jo. "I guess he wanted to see if he could get us to wear ourselves out fighting each other."
"So lowering our psychological resistance to his own attempts to win control of us," said the elf composedly. "This was my evaluation as well."
Jo said, "I didn't think you guys used knew the word "psychological." I figured you just used tree metaphors or some shit to convey that sort of idea."
"Indeed? I did not believe that dwarves understood tactics with more subtlety than "pour magma on it.""
"Yeah, I mostly don't," agreed Jo. "It's called "lava" when you start pouring it on shit that's aboveground, by the way."
"Excuse me if my language offended. - Well, while it might relieve my feelings to free you and so infuriate the Queen, please understand that she holds my people hostage to my good behavior. I cannot put them at risk in such away." The elf looked at her narrowly. "Unless you have the ability to protect them from her. In that case, we might come to an understanding."
Jo sat down in her chair hard, licking her lips. "Back up and tell me who your people are."
"I am of Nelarealirethelire."
"The Silver Beech." Elf names were such a pile of shit. "You guys aren't far from Nashoncog."
"From where Nashoncog once stood, indeed. We felt the tremors of its death," she said calmly. "And I am sixth in line to the throne. To speak frankly, I would that I were a bit closer - I find the policies of my cousin the King and his son and heir distastefully pacifistic. This is likely why I was made envoy to the Queen of Men. They hoped to use my anger as a bluff, and so conceal their fear."
"You don't seem too angry to me," said Jo, examining the elf's sad eyes and twisting hands.
"Indeed. My face and manner appear weak, to human eyes, and I suppose dwarven as well. Not, I think now, that it would have mattered. The Queen cares only for strength, and she has shown me hers. When she comes, we will be overrun. And so I have temporized with her, and searched for a weapon."
"Damn," said Jo. "This might go to my head. Two years locked up inside a meteor, and all of a sudden I'm popular."
The paranormal romance wherein the heroine is the Ancient Evil, and which is also Dwarf Fortress fanfic.
-
GOD SAVE OUR WICKED QUEEN
-
Her existence has obtruded upon the history of Men and beasts for some two millennia. She has been a seer, a warrior, an artist, a slave, and a Queen - primarily, a Queen. She has ruled Men, in some proportion, for most of a thousand years all told.
She has changed little in that time. The Queen is always far-sighted, slow to anger, and quick to act. She surrounds herself, always, with clever advisers and powerful wizards and warriors, whom she calls her Dark Children. Her true children turn on her. She has never had a King. She has the power to make Men immortal.
It has been argued that the Queen's ascendance must be lived with, like the certainty of winter, and that the proper goal of statecraft is to minimize her damage. It has been argued that no thing which lives may live forever, and that the proper goal of statecraft is her death. And it has been argued, too, that we are not Men, and she is not our concern.
- from the memoirs of Enathime, last King of the Elves of the Silver Beech
-
I'm personally an advocate of burying her in a hole.
- a remark alleged to have been made by the dwarf Joenwy Steelhelm shortly before her execution
-
"Men who seek the aid of one of my kind against another," said the Queen, her black eyes flickering as if she gazed into a flame, "Seldom prosper. Yesterday two Men did not prosper; today, one. My Dark Children killed one of them, and my son - with whom these Men thought to make party - killed the others."
"But should you wish to die, then tomorrow is as good a day as any. You will find my son's head in its usual place, but you will find his heart nowhere. Count your blessings. My own heart is merely stone."
The Queen did sometimes recycle turns of phrase; she'd said so very much in her long life that it was inevitable. But she always struck one as very topical and relevant: "It is childish to think that the new, the novel, the clean and bright and thin will ever defeat a darkness as ancient and heavy as mine." She'd first had occasion to say those words about nine hundred years ago, nearly immediately following the invention of the hand cannon.
Today it had to do with her preferred necromancer's cell phone, and some sort of alert tone that paralyzed one's cortical homunculus. The Queen apparently did not possess such an anatomical object, but her necromancer did. He had suffered no permanent injury, aside from the embarrassment of having forgotten the phone at a food truck and, upon regaining it, subsequently forgetting to set it to "silent" before entering the Queen's presence. Her chief of palace security had confiscated his phone, and also kicked him.
"To those who are loyal to me, I say, as always, this: you shall have my protection. And to those who rebel against me, I say this: lie to your families, hide from your lovers, and go to the ground. Nothing will save you, but perhaps you might save them."
She folded her hands.
Behind the cameraman, her chief of palace security applauded.
She frowned at the most obviously-named of her Children, and said to the sound guy, drawing her mound of white hair back over her shoulders, "Did your device hear that noise that he made?"
"No, your majesty."
"Then leave us." He did so as quickly as his immense sound guy dignity allowed. The lights went away, and her throne room darkened. The camera crew always looked silly here, under the carved black stone columns and dim red luminescence of the mossy ceiling. But then the Moth was in a black suit and sunglasses like he'd shown up for the wrong evil empire.
He said, "You're a ham, your majesty."
She said dryly, "I try, little boy." He wondered how old he'd have to be before she stopped calling him that. He'd be thirty next month, if he lived to next month.
He asked, "What were they up to with your kid's head?"
It was kept on public display in a temple with very sarcastic iconography - he'd called himself a god, which his mother had always found exasperating. Not many people ever saw the funny pictures she'd commissioned, as they knew better than to go take a look in the first place. The head still retained some of the powers the man had had when he was whole.
She said, "Oh - they thought to put it in a bag and bring it away and speak to it of war. Against me. Ordinary things. But my children have high standards; he didn't want a bag." She had already lost interest in these particular enemies. There would be more tomorrow. She added, "I sent you somewhere. Why are you still here?"
"You sent me to set fire to elves," he said cheerfully. "I rebelled."
"Lie to your family and hide from your lovers," she instructed, and turned her back to him. Obediently, he took up the slithering pale mass of her hair and began to braid it.
As always, the peculiar texture of it fascinated him. It was covered with tiny, crumbly-edged scales, like an old snakeskin, and all of it together weighed about twenty pounds. You could garrote a man with it, and they both had. Some strands were thicker than others, and some grew not out of her scalp, but her neck or ears, or other strands. Her skin shone like an alien metal, dark red and pearlescent, just a few shades paler than her wide whiteless eyes. She had no pores, no blemishes, no scars; impermeable.
She asked again, "Why are you here, little boy?"
He asked, "You remember what you wanted for your birthday two years ago?"
"The world." She made an impatient movement of one hand. He could not see her face, but it would be very still; she didn't waste expression on herself. "Always the world. Of *you,* I asked the creature who destroyed the dwarvish city of Nashoncog - the Hellbent. You were the only one of my Children who did not bring me my present." The Dark Children had heavy responsibilities, and the Queen's birthday present was among the heaviest.
Withdrawing a hand he'd cut on her to blot it on his sleeve, Moth corrected her, "I got you your Hellbent."
"I wanted a servant. You brought me a prisoner. A bloodied one full of rage, one who must be guarded at all times by two of my Dark Children. A constant drain on my treasury and my power." The Queen's voice turned like fall into winter; the temperature of the room dropped, and the thin light weakened. She could do things like that, with her voice, though she didn't often do them to him these days. "You misjudged your enemy, little boy. I wasn't pleased with you. I'm still not, when reminded. Why have you reminded me?"
"I want to try again," he said, making his voice light.
"Why?" She shrugged - a small, economical gesture. Physical language did not come naturally to her, and she got it over with quickly. "The forces that the Hellbent channel are old, and as stubborn in their chosen orbit as is this round world; they cannot be taken to leash. I tried it once, six hundred years ago, and I lost my capital city and nine of my Dark Children all in a single night. It took me nearly a hundred years to wrest back the throne from my idiot son. The Hellbent are far too dangerous. This one's killed fifty thousand."
He said in surprise, "I thought you liked that sort of stuff."
She understood sarcasm, but she usually chose to ignore it: "Killing fifty thousand dwarves? Yes. None of you, the youngest of my Children, has ever broken a city for me." Her voice was soft and dense with shadows. "This world of yours was different when I was in my prime, little boy. Destroyer of Cities - this was a *title* I would give. I remember the day that my rebellious son, knowing himself at last defeated, scoured the skies clean of clouds that his doomed orcish armies, ranged exhausted across the mountains, could watch in terror and awe as my Cold-Hands drowned their country of Runak in the sea. This, I think, is the only beauty the orcs know to this day... To name *you* Destroyer would shame Cold-Hands."
She'd killed Seglant the Cold-Hands herself.
He said flippantly, "Urban infrastructure's expensive now, your majesty. It's not productive knock modern cities down every time they annoy you. We've talked about this."
"Infrastructure." She shrugged again. "You mortals were spoiled under my worthless daughter's reign. It's good that I finally dealt with that girl... An effective ruler *must* have a servant whose mere presence in a land is a clear threat to its continued existence. A Piper, a Silver-Haired Child, or a Hellbent - one of those."
"So, you do still want your Hellbent," he concluded pleasantly, giving her her braid back. "You mind if I go up there for a visit?"
She turned and looked at him incuriously. "Why now, little boy?"
He handed removed two sheets of paper from his pocket. "Here. It's a report from the Dreamer that came in thirty-five minutes ago, and another from our observers along the Not-Runak-Anymore-Sea coast, fifteen minutes ago."
She read them both carefully, all the way through, without blinking her eyes. "...And you think that this changes things, in a Hellbent's eyes?"
He shrugged. "Worth a try. And I like giving you presents, you know."
She looked impassively at him. She said, "Go, then. But go cautiously. You're no Cold-Hands, but I want you alive." There was something oddly sweet about those large dark eyes, like a dog's - a lie.
He bowed. She was already walking away when he got his head back up. She was a busy woman.
-
The Queen's city, which she called just that - "my city" - and which other people moderately called Purgatory, was built in a circle around her stronghold Nel, which itself rested upon a dead cindercone volcano set improbably alone on a wide plain. It looked pretty much like the sort of place you'd find the Queen.
Nel was made of a dark stone which resembled gray hematite but was, according an off-handed remark she had once made, the emission of a massive beetle which ate hope. She'd won its services in some sort of eldritch card game during the period in which her son had cast her body into the *actual* Purgatory. Her soul he'd placed elsewhere, but it seemed that the rest of her could carry on without it. It was little things like that that had always made her the greatest of her monstrous family.
Whatever Nel was, rain and centuries had taken their toll on her towers, and they now looked a bit sunken and melted, with surprising large pitted marks like bubbles in places that got a lot of sun. To Moth this gave it an oddly comfortable-looking aspect, except for being so black.
In certain lights and from certain angles, Nel was subject to a kind of optical illusion. Portions of it seemed to become translucent, and its strange chambers and disturbing residents visible to those below who could not enter. He had seen it only once, half a lifetime ago, in a pale golden sunset at the end of a very long day. His sister had seen it first, and she had showed him the right way to hold his head. They had watched until the changing angle of the light made it black again.
It had seemed very beautiful to both of them, then; and it had been, he still believed, some sort of challenge.
In the present day it was a nice bright opaque morning, with lots of sun wasting itself on Nel's hot black towers. Moth took the outdoor route to his apartments, his feet ringing on the shining paths. Grim-faced servants in gray, scuttling here and there, saw Moth and avoided him; tradesmen and diplomats didn't bother. Most people didn't recognize him out of the uniform of the Dark Children, until he started burning things.
He'd better stop by his room and change. You felt more comfortable dealing with the Hellbent when you knew that the rest of the world saw you and flinched.
There were a lot of little courtyards and decorative nooks scattered around Nel - things the Queen had requested rather than things her beetle servant had wanted, he'd always assumed, though he'd never seen her stop to admire any of them. As he passed a small garden of velvet-gray moss and silver flowers, a woman and a bear stepped out from behind a statue of a dead Dark Child and startled him half to death. Goddamn elves.
"Has something happened?" asked the Lady Lenuse anxiously, her hand curled tight in her pet's fur. The bear, a hulking brown thing with too-intelligent eyes, glowered at him. The Lady Lenuse always looked anxious, and her bear always glowered. "I heard a strange voice in my ear, saying that I would not go to Tayoliririli today." He wished Nel didn't talk so damn much.
The Queen's original assignment to him had been to escort the Lady, an emissary of the free Elvish nation of the Silver Beech, on a tour of the somewhat-less-free Elvish enclave of Tayoliririli, which had taken a slight beating in its recent attempts to regain its sovereignty. The Queen wished that certain ideas be hammered into Lenuse's yellow head. He said, "Sorry. I've got stuff to do."
"But when will I see Tayoliririli?" she asked anxiously. "I wrote to Lord Avenema to say I would come this week."
"Stuff to do!" he said cheerfully. "Now, if you were to take the Queen up on her offer -"
Lenuse wrung her hands. It was easy to laugh at her, but unlike some Dark Children he might have named, the elf, at least, never descended to hysterics. The worst she ever did was the hand-wringing thing. "I cannot serve both your Queen and my people," she said unhappily. "I am here as an ambassador, not as a - as a gift."
He looked Lenuse over critically. He wasn't sure whether he'd take her as a gift. She wasn't bad-looking, though her waist-length hair was too flat and dry for it to make sense to call it "golden" or "honey-colored," and her green eyes weren't the kind you compared to emeralds, if you were being realistic. Her voice was nice enough, if you based your personal opinions on the sorts of sounds people made.
The Queen didn't, but she meant to have Lenuse. The elf woman was reputed to be one of the most powerful healing wizards alive, and the Queen had recently lost the only healer among her Dark Children to the orcs. None of those remaining had gotten a look at Lenuse in action yet, but they had been instructed to try. Moth'd been thinking about setting the bear on fire.
The bear growled at him, not liking the look on his face. He told it, "You don't get a vote. - Hey, you want to go someplace else? It'll be fun."
Lenuse studied his face warily. "Where?"
"Say yes and I'll tell you."
The bear growled an objection. Someone beside him said, "Little bug."
"What?" he asked, annoyed. "Go bite somebody." Wolfden Sharptooth had come up behind him. The Old Dog was partway between his wolf and human forms, a shattered-looking creature bent over and covered unevenly with scrappy gray fur, his face warped and elongated. He would be easier on the eyes in a couple of days, when both moons were full and he was all wolf. The high-collared, severe uniform of the Dark Children fit him badly; he had seven different ones, tailored for the different phases of his transformation, but Moth thought he never looked quite right until he reached wolf form.
"Have you Her permission to take it places?" he asked. Lenuse tried to look haughty, but mostly only looked sad, like usual. "This may not please Her."
"It'll be educational," said Moth carelessly. "You can go ask Her if you want."
"No," said Sharptooth, smiling at him toothily. "You take your own risks. Where do you go?"
"To see your best friend."
The Hellbent was not the Old Dog's best friend. His furred throat vibrated with a soundless growl. "Hopeless," he said. "You should not bother. I shall kill it if you bring it back here."
"Ask Her if it's okay first," he said, unimpressed. "Hey, you're on your wolf-period - you smell too bad to use your hellsteed right now. Let me have it."
"Why? What did you do with your own?"
"I don't remember. Guess."
"I guess that there was fire." Sharptooth grinned at him. Moth shrugged impatiently. "You are an expensive pet, burning so many of the Queen's nice things. Will the elf loan the bear to me in trade?"
The bear huffed. "I will not," Lenuse said to Sharptooth with a frown. "And I have not yet agreed to go anywhere with him. *Who* is he going to see?"
"A monster which it once failed to tame," said Sharptooth, still smiling. "We keep it caged."
Moth said, "Sure. You can feed it breadcrumbs and make friends, Lenuse, it'll be cute."
Lenuse looked at him suspiciously. "Why are you going to see this monster?"
"To see if it's ready to be tamed yet."
Lenuse knit her brows. "...and if it is tamed, you will no longer... cage it?"
"That's the plan," Moth said, grinning at her. She looked at him reproachfully. Elves had a deep, instinctive distaste for imprisonment, even of monsters. They killed them or sent them on their way.
"Very well. We go," she said to the bear. The bear made a grumbling noise. To Moth she said, "I shall saddle him."
"I don't think the bear can keep up with a hellsteed," Moth told her. "We've got six hundred miles to cover today. I'll find you -"
Lenuse said calmly, "My Biss is very swift. Are you not, dear Biss?" The bear rumbled impatiently at her. He guessed he trusted her judgment on that - Lenuse's people'd fought wars against hellsteeds, and usually they'd won. That was why the hellsteeds didn't have heads anymore.
"Do what you want, I guess. Meet me at the western stair in twenty minutes." He watched the elf walk off with her bear, content enough. He'd might as well get a look at how that damn animal acted outside of Nel, given that he put the odds at fifty-fifty the thing'd go for his throat someday. And someone always got hurt in a confrontation with a Hellbent. He might finally get to see Lenuse's power.
"You take risks," pointed out Sharptooth accurately, following him.
A few hundred yards down Nel's windowless black sides they could see the courtyard of Purgatory's central temple, full of travellers there to observe Her daughter's creations. Moth picked out a few elves by their height, and some pale dwarves clustered in the shade. The roar and sweaty scent of the place drifted up, dulled by distance, like the ocean. A young man with chalk-covered hands was slowly scaling the wall, apparently invisible to those below him. But Moth observed, like the color of his hair, the idea of fire on him; he had explosives. Moth could see things like that.
He leaned over the edge and opened his hand, letting a little flame fall, a little slower than gravity-acceleration. The boy had time to get out of the way, if he wasn't too stupid too look up. "It's fine."
"You may lose the elf without gaining the Hellbent," he said.
"I don't think so," he said calmly, watching his target's clothes take light. The tiny figure tumbled, like a toy, and suddenly burst. He hadn't looked up. Idiot. "I feel pretty good about this. I think I'll get them both."
"You think too little," muttered Sharptooth, climbing up a stone too peer over the edge. "Who was that that you burned?"
"I don't know, someone. I'm always thinking."
"You think about fire," said Sharptooth disgustedly. "Things do not go your way, or they bore you - you burn them. You could take more time with the elf, but you don't, because she does not interest you. So you force the issue by making her see what we do. She will refuse the Queen, because of you."
"Maybe." The guards were on their way over. It was pretty convenient how, any time Moth set fire to somebody in Purgatory, a bunch of guards came running. The Queen had instituted the program a few years ago, so he wouldn't be inconvenienced by the terrible burden of cleaning up after himself, she'd told him. "I don't think so, though. She knows what we do. I'm just going to be honest with her."
"You are never honest," Sharptooth said disgustedly. "Go then and frighten the elf and rage at the monster. When the Queen discards you, you will deserve it."
"Historically that's usually how it's worked, yeah," he said. "Don't you worry about me."
"I never do," said Sharptooth, his teeth clicking. "You must worry about yourself." And limped off on all fours, muttering disgustedly to himself.
Moth really tried not to worry about himself. That was a hole with no bottom.
-
Six hundred miles later, he reached the end of the sunlight and the End of the World at about the same time. They conspired together to turn the sky the color of a rusty pipe. The End of the World was a hilly place, a bruised violet color in the swampy valleys, velvet gray on the hilltops. None of the thin plants grew higher than his shoulders. The reluctant copses of spindly trees on some of the hills were not quite as tall as the grass in the puddles.
Lenuse perched swaying atop her bear, pale and drained. The bear, by contrast, looked as fresh as it had that morning, and as pissed at him. Moth hated that stupid bear.
Lenuse asked uncertainly, "What is that?" The rough oval stone on which the Queen had built the Hellbent's prison, ninety feet across each way and twenty high at the apex, looked like some kind of mistake.
Moth said cheerfully, "That right there would be my little monster's cage." He hopped off Sharptooth's hellsteed to meet the figure waiting for them in front of the little house below the stone.
The Dreamer, one of the two Dark Children his Queen was presently wasting to guard Moth's mistake, was nearly eight feet tall, with a wide face cratered like the moon with scars, and one broken tooth jutting out on the right side of his mouth. Some young Orcs, before maturity made their jaws heavy and their skin rock-hard, could nearly pass for the elves whose dead parts they'd been made from. The Dreamer had never been one of them. Sarg's skin was the color of drying grass, his hair a tangled rust-orange mane going halfway down his back.
He was out of uniform, in muddy jeans and a grayish t-shirt whose original color was unidentifiable, and no boots over his big clawed feet. He stood beside Moth with the posture of a puppet with some cut strings, and hard tired bruises below his eyes.
Lenuse, out of earshot, was looking at them curiously. It was a little hard for most people to believe that the Moth - narrow, of ordinary height and smooth brown skin, and possessed of a thoroughly unmemorable and human face - could have much to do with the Dreamer, the Old Dog, the Displaced One, or the others she'd met. Most of them were actually closer to being human than he was, but he usually looked the most like one.
The Dreamer told him glumly, "Did not want to go past the barrier after those damn things crawled under. Decided to wait, when you said were coming."
"Sarg, for fuck's sake, are you or are you not one of the Wicked Queen's Dark Children? What are you making me do this for?"
"Not one of the *real* Dark Children, me," he said grumpily. "One of the ones sits in a safe damn *room* -"
"What's your room look like?" asked Moth, peering up at the little black box atop the stone that had been the Hellbent's unwilling home for two years. "I've never seen it."
"You keep your mouth shut. Cannot fight a damn Hellbent, me."
Moth shrugged. *He* didn't want to try it a second time, either, but with luck the Hellbent in question wasn't sure of that. "Fine. You can come open the outer barrier for me. I want to save my strength in case the inner one breached."
Sarg followed him gloomily, his bare feet dragging in the mud. As they approached the prickling silver line on the ground that marked the outer barrier, he stopped.
He said again, "Cannot fight her."
Moth eyed him. "So've you been *talking* to the ancient evil, Sarg?
Sarg looked away. "...some."
Moth restrained a sigh. He said firmly, "Okay, don't. She's not what she looks like." He'd learned that lesson two years ago. "You want me to switch with you for a while?"
"...Queen cannot spare you," he said uncertainly.
"She can't spare you, either," said Moth sharply. He was getting sick of the constant reminders of the goddamn mess he'd made. "Go get your things packed and leave. - Tell the elf to help you. Either I'll be down in half an hour or we're all dead."
Sarg stood rooted to the spot, uncertain whether to be hopeful or suspicious. The Dreamer should never have been sent here. The Hellbent was not a stupid woman. By now she might have figured out some uses for a jailer who hated himself.
Sarg said finally, "Good luck, then." He kicked a hole in the barrier, and Moth hopped through before it could close itself.
The Hellbent's magic hit him like a wave crashing. He heard Sarg swear, and realized he was burning. He put it out impatiently.
The air was different in here, warmer, wet, and a little moldy. Mushrooms grew everywhere, as dense as the grass, and he kicked up little clouds of spores as he approached the stone. The light seemed clearer, and the colors were richer.
There was something simultaneously overwhelming and comforting in a Hellbent's power - like a huge dog pressing its paws against your chest, or a bonfire. The first time he'd felt it, he'd liked it. Later he'd learned better.
At the base of the stone, he kicked his shoes off and left them in the slimy grass. You couldn't track any dirt up to her door. She'd nearly escaped that way once.
He climbed the rough path cut into the stone to her cell, about half-prepared to die. He had no real idea whether the inner barrier had held. Trying to find its paltry magic in hers was like trying to sift a pinch of flour out of a pound of salt.
He reached the top and peered through the carved stone bars. They opened incongruously onto a tidy dwarvish sitting room.
It was about the same as he remembered it: a low dwarf-sized blue sofa with a couple cushions; a reading lamp, switched off; bookshelves, fuller than they'd been when he'd last come here, and there was one more of them; a wooden desk with some notebooks scattered around it and a vase in the middle; no flowers. The Hellbent was an important prisoner, and the Queen let her buy things, within reason. Nothing of raw stone, of course. There were two paintings on the walls now instead of one, but they were both of elephants, and he couldn't figure out which one was new. The door to her bedroom was closed, the door to her kitchen was open. It looked very ordinary.
Joenwy Steelhelm had spent most of her life in an excruciatingly uninteresting manner: went to school, went to school some more, taught history at a dwarvish university, married and divorced another professor very quickly - he'd quit, she'd stayed.
She'd never bothered to hide that she was a geomancer of some kind. Her people had just thought she must be weak.
He'd thought so, too.
Since then, he had done some research on the woman he'd mishandled so badly, whose stubborness might still get him killed. It seemed she had not been entirely contented with her quiet little life. Moth's life had been a little too exciting, which was why he now worked for the Queen; he envied the one she'd lived. Well, maybe she did, too, these days.
The Hellbent had been just short of her own thirtieth birthday when she'd punched a hole through her city.
He called, "Hellbent?"
She said, "What."
"Where are you?" he asked, because she sounded close - and then she raised her head, and he realized she had been sitting on the sofa, very still. He'd forgotten how easily geomancers could disappear into the scenery.
Steelhelm stood up stiffly, and he was surprised, all over again, by how normal she looked. She was a pale-pink little dwarf woman, heavyset and slow-moving, with dull black hair grown midway down her back now. He could never remember what color her eyes were; brown or something.
The immensity of her power hung over them like a mountain. She dragged her battered wooden desk chair over to the bars and dropped heavily into it. "So did you bring me a goddamn souvenir, Obviousname?"
"Sorry, I was in a hurry." He saw now that his eyes had adjusted that there were a few gouges on the chair and on the tile floor, deep and clawlike. He said, "What happened?"
She shrugged. "Ask Sarg."
"He didn't see much. He says he was doing something to the outer barrier when they showed up."
She scratched her greasy hair. "He didn't see because he wasn't here. He's a greenwitch, and the soil here's bad. Sometimes he goes and roots himself in a vegetable garden somewhere for a day or two."
He cocked his head at her. "You're tattling on your favorite jailer, Hellbent?"
Moth had guarded her the first six months, as punishment for his sins; neither of them had been very professional about things. Since then Sharptooth and Sarg had taken turns. Sharptooth, characteristically, had bitten her. He could see the jagged gray scar across the back of her right hand.
She said, "You're getting rid of him anyway. You get rid of people you can't use."
She sounded like she wanted to make the earth swallow him up. He wasn't too worried about that. She didn't go in for small individual acts of vengeance. She played for larger stakes.
He said placidly, "You got it. So what happened?"
It took her a second to put her anger away - he could see the effort in her pale face - but she did it. She always did. Self-control was part of being whatever she was.
"See the hill out there?" She pointed, wincing when her finger brushed the invisible barrier. He'd helped make it, and like everything he made, it burned. The bars were mostly there to discourage her from an obvious bad decision.
She said, in a drowsy voice that made the air stop moving, "There's a black spot on top of it now, but before, there were trees. The leaves all started falling off them about a week ago. At that time shadows began to appear on the ground, in places where there was nothing to cast them. They were not conspicuous until they began to move, and then their voices became audible. They listed the names of flowers with little smell and birds without voices, and not much else, at first."
Able to breathe again, he did so, then said, "Sarg didn't notice all this? With the - talking about birds, and stuff?" Moth's powers were more straightforward than this stuff. He just burned.
"He hasn't come up for about two weeks. He calls to make sure I'm still here." She dug a battered black cell phone out of her pocket; it called only to the guardhouse, and was intended for "emergencies." Moth was not, himself, certain what that word meant in a context of a ticked-off Hellbent. "I don't think it's obvious unless you're close. Is he pretty far back?"
"- Yeah, the guardhouse is a ways back," Moth said, surprised. "I keep forgetting you can only see in one direction."
She looked at him like something she wanted to crush between big rocks again. He grinned at her.
After a long moment she put it away and shrugged, leaning back in her chair again. "Last night the shadows stood up and spoke more loudly, and the ground broke apart where they'd been lying."
"Is that how you hurt your arm? Some polite conversation with some shadows?"
She glanced down at the lump of the bandage under her loose sleeve. Moth'd made sure she was given first aid supplies - though as the intention was allow her to patch herself up after failed escape attempts, they were heaviest on burn treatment. She said in her ordinary voice, "Yeah, assholes moved faster than I expected."
"And you never felt like pointing any of this out to Sarg?" he asked sharply. Purely professionally speaking, he didn't like the idea of dead things moving in with his special prisoner and threatening her. He thought he'd made the place very secure.
She shrugged. "I made them leave. Your thing didn't burn them," she pointed out, disinterested professional criticism. "They just kept going."
He'd been standing too long, and he was tired. He sat down on the rough stone and leaned against her bars; the barrier didn't care about things outside going in, only things inside going out. He heard her shift her chair back away from him. He said, "They're coming from the Hill, of course. Do you know about the Hill? It's the only thing north of here before the ice. People walk up it, a hundred or so each year, when they never want to come back down."
"I know the Hill," said Steelhelm, her voice sleepy and Hellbent again. "Someone came back down once. To warn that any living creature who used magic to blur the lines between life and death, would find the lines redrawn sharply."
He applauded. He loved women who said spooky things.
"So I guess your Queen shouldn't have been raising the fucking dead," she commented, mortal again.
His fist clenched involuntarily, and he felt her sharp eyes on it. He *knew* that Sarg and Sharptooth hadn't known about that. How the hell had she found out?
He said after a while, "You know, Hellbent, that this was the only place on earth that we could find to safely imprison you?"
"Yeah. Sarg said it was a meteorite," she said. "All I know is it doesn't hear me when I talk." Her voice was studiously flat when she said it. He wondered, as he often had when he was her jailer, if it hurt a Hellbent to live in an unnatural place like this. Or a dwarf, for that matter.
"It's not from here," he agreed. "The stone here was formed on another world, a cold and airless one, where no living flesh ever lived or died. You have no power over it. The Queen sent me to check out several sites, but this stone here is the only one on earth with a low enough concentration of living soil to confine you."
"Sorry for the trouble."
He said, "And now the Dead are coming here. And very soon we'll have no place to store you." He shut his eyes. "Now, remind me of something - what sort of people do I get rid of?"
He heard her shift in her chair.
"When are you going to start being *useful* to me, Hellbent?"
"You could let me go, you know, jackass," she said sharply. She was fully mortal now, and furious. "I don't care about your Queen. She *never* mattered to me - *none* of you did. I had work to do, and I still do. You've got no idea how much danger you're putting the world in keeping me -"
He said impatiently, "We've gone over this. You're the only Hellbent alive. The Queen's got to be the one who has you."
"No one else's gonna get me, the whole world thinks you fucking incinerated me two years ago. If you let me go, I'll walk out of here, drop down into the caverns, and no one will ever hear from me again," she snarled. "That's all it takes. You stop wasting your time and mine."
He just shook his head, "You know, maybe you think you could do that. Just walk away from us, after what we've done to you. I mean, sure, I hear there are people like that in the world... But me, I'm the suspicious type. I let you go, and I spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder." He yawned and got to his feet, stretching. "I like my peace of mind. I'm not going to let you do that to me."
"So you've got two options. I'm giving you one last day to pick one. Think about it."
Then, tired out, he sat down again.
After a minute she pointed out neutrally, "You know, usually when the bad guy says shit like that, he leaves his victim alone to think about it. It's a psychological thing."
"You're no victim, Hellbent, and it's been a long day. Can you make me some coffee?"
"Yeah, probably." She got over things quickly. He really didn't want to kill her.
-
Jo was washing the coffee pot when the phone rang. She jumped, and it shattered against one side of the metal sink, suddenly and completely, not a single shard larger than her finger.
She had the feeling that the glass had been waiting for this for a long time. Objects that were close to stone and dirt always felt warm to her, and many seemed to have thoughts. She lifted her hands away slowly, examining the dripping soap for blood. It felt like the sort of day that she'd hurt herself.
It wasn't because of the dead - she knew about that. It was because of the human lying down outside. She'd known he'd be the one to come back with an ultimatum, if anyone did. She'd hoped he'd get himself killed first. He made her too angry. She didn't always trust herself, and the times when she was angry, she trusted herself least of all. Anger was a pure sort of thing. Jo was most comfortable with things of the other sort.
She picked the phone up with her hands still wet. "Yeah?"
"Is the Moth with you? Can he - talk to me?"
Sarg's deep voice was tense - she could picture him, rubbing the back of his neck with his right hand. Before, that had generally been something he'd done when he was worried about the other Dark Children getting mad at him. Today, he was scared she'd killed his boss. Well, that was nice. At least one person here was scared of her.
"Yeah, he's here," she said, drying her left hand on her pants and switching to it. "Hang on."
"What's he doing?" Sarg demanded suspiciously. "Is he with you? There's been a message."
She considered the implications of those questions for a split second. "- wait, what do you *think* he's doing?"
He made some kind of snarly noise she couldn't interpret. Orcs did a lot of that. She wondered if he'd started doing the neck-rubbing thing on purpose, because he didn't want to scare members of smaller species. "Prison guard" wasn't a good career path for Sarg.
The Moth called from the ground outside, "Is that for me?"
She'd thought he was asleep out there. She walked over to the door. "Yeah. He's got some kind of message -"
"From the Queen," Sarg interjected unnecessarily.
"From the one I'm going to bury in a hole."
The Moth said impatiently, "Yeah, well, he can tell you or he can come up here. I'm tired."
She repeated, accidentally in nearly the same tone of voice, "Either tell me or come here, he says."
"- But what's he going to *do* with you?" asked Sarg, sounding a little dazed.
"- why are you asking *me* that?" she asked blankly. "Do you want me to forward that on to him? How's he supposed to *answer*?"
The Moth said, "What's he asking you?"
She added, "He's asking what you're asking me." She wondered why she was helping the guy who was going to kill her scare the guy who was going to let him. Well, she was the ancient motherfucking evil in the room - she was probably duty-bound to take a monster over a coward.
"No," Sarg said confusedly, she wasn't sure to what. "I'll read it."
"Fine," she said.
The Moth said curiously, "What was he asking that you made that face, Hellbent?"
Jo ignored him; the Orc read to her, and like a good girl she repeated it: "My spies among the Orcs of Runak have confirmed it, and so now there is no doubt: a new island has arisen within Orcish waters, and an army of the dead is being raised thereon. It is not known whether these are the Orcs' dead, nor whether the Chieftan Rath did choose to raise them. The ambassador has denied knowledge, but will be questioned more thoroughly. From Rath himself, there is no word. Ogter has graciously given it to us to know that he does not much like the dead to walk, and believes that it was I who raised them." Who's Ogter?"
The Moth asked, "Was that part you or Sarg?"
"That was me."
"Ogter's Rath's heir. He was named last winter, and he's nineteen and wants to, you know - enslave all the humans, eat all the meat, collect all the interspecies concubines. Maybe he wants to repopulate Runak, doesn't realize orcs are sterile? - Seriously, Rath's not a dumb guy, I just *can't* figure out why he picked this kid."
"You are in an amazing fucking position to be questioning other political leaders' choices," she said.
So, the dead were rising in other places, too. It wasn't surprising; one resurrection always led to three plagues of the dead. It was the law of the ground. She wondered where number three was going to be.
She put the phone back to her ear. The orc on the line was saying unhappily, "- ignore me."
She told Sarg, "I'm not fucking ignoring you. Back up to "who raised them.""
Sarg said, "That was it. Is he -"
She told the Moth, "That was it."
The Moth said, "Ask him if the Queen's called me back?"
"He wants to know if -"
Sarg said, "There was nothing about him."
She relayed that.
"I'll be down in a while, Sarg. Pack and go home. Hang up, Hellbent."
Her jailer was complaining. She hung up on him. She stuck the phone in her pocket and ignored it when it buzzed again. "You're sending him home?" she asked warily.
"I get rid of people I can't use," the Moth reminded her. "What was he asking you about?"
Jo looked at him and thought, as she often did when dealing with him, about childhood social development. Bullies with a posse went for someone who acted like they didn't need to be in the posse - somebody too confident. Bullies without a posse went the other way and shot at the easiest target. Her personal bully'd been taking shots at his subordinate, and now he was going at her. He felt all alone. *He's in trouble,* she decided, pleased.
Out loud, she said, "He wanted to know what you were going to do with me."
"Call him back and explain that I'm going to have rough sex with you." He smiled up at her.
She said, "So what's the etiquette? Do you get paid up *front*, or do I just leave some of the local currency on the dresser?"
He sighed and got to his feet. "You just love to hurt my feelings. I'll go make sure he leaves."
"Take your time," she said. She headed back to the kitchen to clean up the glass.
If she could get one goddamn toe on some real dirt - or even if those damn dead things had been solid enough to track some *mud* up - Fuck everything, of course they hadn't been. She didn't have that kind of luck.
To do her work, she would need a connection to the living earth beneath this dead stone. She'd had one once. The wolf-thing, Sharptooth, hadn't wiped one of his paws carefully enough one day, and had accidentally laid a thin line of dirt from the ground to her doorstep. She'd been cautious with it, probing with long tendrils of soil for the best line of attack.
They'd caught her at it within three hours; the wolf had bitten her for embarrassing him. She never saw the second of her guards, but after that day, she that it existed. Someone who was always watching, and never slept.
She'd decided that if she ever got a line again, even for a split-second, she'd bury her entire prison underground immediately and worry about little details like oxygen later. The Queen's people were smart and fast. If she ever had another chance, she'd have to make do with being stronger.
If she had a chance within the next week. Maybe zombies would show up here next. Zombies didn't wipe their feet.
*Your life has probably taken a wrong turn somewhere when you're praying for a zombie attack.*
She dropped the remains of her coffeepot in the trash and abandoned her life by the side of the road. Then she went to take a shower. She'd better look her best for the zombies.
-
Her jailer called cheerily, "I'm home!"
Jo, sitting at the kitchen table, glowered at the door. She'd changed into her pajamas already; she'd decided he wasn't coming back. She called, "I'm eating."
"What?"
"Grilled cheese sandwiches. You want one?"
"Thank you, Hellbent, I'd love one."
She carried the plate out of the kitchen to the doorstep. She felt a low pulse of hatred, as always, at the sight of someone standing outside. He stuck his hand through the bars, and she dropped a sandwich into it.
He withdrew it and asked curiously, "Do you feed Sarg? Does he have mommy issues about you?"
"He has trouble eating the processed stuff," she said. "He'll drink tea." She didn't think people's mommy issues applied to a Hellbent. Hellbents were the opposite of that.
"Poor baby," said the Moth, sitting down cross-legged on the stone to eat. He was barefoot again. Jackass. "What sort of food are you getting now, anyway? Aside from cheese and bread, I mean."
She said, dropping grumpily into her chair, "Same menu as when you were here. I told them to stop sending a couple things."
"You're so picky. And you got a new bookshelf?"
She looked at it warily. "Queen's Birthday present from the fucking Queen. Or, I think it was from her. It came with some books about her." The new shelf, against the wall just to the right of her cage's door, had been there when she woke up on the Queen's Birthday a couple months ago. It wasn't wood, like the others; it was made from the same stone as her prison. It was a warning.
"From her," he agreed, reaching in and dropping the bread crusts on the floor in a successful attempt to piss her off. "Did you read them?"
She had. She didn't have a lot to do. "Is she really the same person?"
He laid down on the ground. "Yes."
"Why do you believe that?"
"Physical resemblance, patterns of speech, patterns of behavior. Certain skills..." He yawned. "I wondered about it when I was a kid. But I've killed a lot of weird things for her, and I've seen what happens when she gets hurt. She can't be killed."
Jo thought of the strange-looking woman with the randomly-selected facial expressions she'd seen on television. "That woman on TV's just an actress, right?" She didn't look like anything Jo'd every seen, but then non-dwarves weren't really her area of study.
"No, that's her." He grinned. "Yeah, she's like a bad actress playing herself. I was just telling her that this morning. I think she's bored with her peacetime persona. She talks about going to war a lot lately."
"Yeah? Maybe I don't want to help her with that."
He stretched out on the dark stone, his smile sleepy. "Then don't."
"...and what happens then?"
"Then you're not useful to me, Hellbent."
She said, "Yeah. I understood that. I guess what I'm asking is, what are your fucking plans for the next day?"
He opened his eyes and looked at her with cold deliberation. He freed one hand from behind his head and held it palm-up above his chest. A flame shot up from it, clean and blue-hot.
He said quietly, "You become one of the Queen's Dark Children, and swear to serve her for the rest of your life. Otherwise, in twenty-four hours, you will burn."
She said, "And if I promise and then run away? I can do that, you know. I can go places where nothing else can survive."
His dark eyes locked on hers, flat and disturbing. He said quietly, "You'll wish you'd burned." He stretched out and closed his eyes again. "Besides the fact that you're going to die, Hellbent - the way I understand it, anyway, a geomancer's first duty is to prepare the earth so that the dead sleep quietly within. Even a geomancer of your personal inclinations, I'm guessing. If the dead don't sleep, the earth is troubled. Some of the dead are awake. This isn't just about what you want."
"Who'd your Queen bring back?" she asked. "Why'd she do it?"
"It was the weekend, the internet went down, Sharptooth'd chewed up her knitting bag," he said impatiently. "That'll be your business once you've made your vow."
"See, there's this thing "pattern recognition." She's raised the dead, and that kind of fucking offends me. There's no reason I see that she won't make me do other things that fucking offend me."
"Yeah, she makes her accountants do pretty offensive things, too. The janitors and the pizza place also facilitate all that doing of evil deeds that we do. But the accountants and pizza guys can't lay all these damn undead running around. You can. I think you better get to it."
"Maybe they'll kill all the fucking orcs and go back to bed," she said flatly.
"We'll see! You've got a day. I'll let you know if I hear back about that." He turned his head like he'd heard something. "Oh, yeah, I brought you a new friend. She's going to feed you breadcrusts and domesticate you."
"Why the fuck did you kidnap an elf?"
"I didn't kidnap her, she wants to make *friends*. She's waving at me, I'm going to let her in." He formed a ball of fire between his hands, and she jumped back from the heat. He hurled it down at the forcefield. She felt faintly, through the muffling effect of the inner field, the outer breaching. He commented, annoyed, "She's bringing her bear up. I don't know why that thing's got to go everywhere with her, I think she even sleeps with it."
"She's got a war bear? Those things are expensive."
"Yeah, I only hang out with elves who are pretty much loaded. Hey, Lenuse! You've got to wipe your feet or you'll definitely die. Purification ritual, or something. The bear has to do it, too."
After a moment, a blonde head came into view, then the rest of the woman, then a huge brown bear, which appeared to have actually stopped to wipe its feet. The elf said to the Moth, frowning, "That house is not suitable for two people and a bear."
"Yeah, I guess you'll have to sleep outside. Lenuse, this is the Hellbent, she's the avatar of unspecified ancient forces of darkness, she killed fifty thousand people. Hellbent, this is Lenuse. Sometimes she probably sings to wild birds and they bring her jewels."
The elf corrected him, "They bring flowers and herbs, as is appropriate. You -" She looked at Jo, her brow knitted. "You... It has been widely reported that he executed you. There was a video taken." She turned to look at the Moth suddenly, surprised. "Then that was the shapeshifter Dark Child, Butterfly! She was reported dead some time before -"
"Butterfly's dead," the Moth told her briefly. "The Hellbent lived, obviously."
Lenuse looked at her - an intense look, disconcerting in its complete honesty. The bear was looking at her more narrowly, like it was trying to figure out if it could take her. It rumbled a comment at Lenuse, who looked back at it with an unreadable look on her thin face. She said after a moment, "...You have no scars. Yet you were badly burned."
Jo didn't think she remembered that. She shrugged.
The bear made another remark. Lenuse said, "Yes, you did tell me - so, someone healed her. Yet I have been told that there is none with my ability, among the Dark Children. - what happened to the one who did this?" she asked the Moth, her voice cool. "Did they flee, disgusted at being made to save one such as this? Or did she kill them? - Excuse me, dwarf," she said, nodding to her politely, "But my people would not have revived you. There is no penance for what you did."
"Yeah, that's what I hear," said Jo, rubbing her eyes. "Why'd you bring me an elf, Obviousname?"
"Hey, *she* said she wanted to come."
"You told me there would be a monster," Lenuse objected petulantly. There's such a thing as a straight line that works best left alone.
The Moth had laid down again and shut his eyes. He said, "You can leave if you're bored. Go build, like, a dwelling out of sticks and leaves."
The bear grunted disgustedly at him. Lenuse said coolly, "I don't like you. Come, Biss." The bear gave Jo a last suspicious bear look, then followed its mistress back down the side of the stone.
Jo asked, "Who's Butterfly?"
He said, "She's dead now. - hey, there aren't elf geomancers, are there?"
"There are, but they all suck."
"She's just jealous she can't be cool like you," he said reassuringly. "- can she? Or are you ancient evil types different from regular geomancers somehow?"
"Somehow. I'm pretty sure the Hellbent's always been a dwarf, though," Jo said.
He opened his eyes and looked at her curiously. "Wait, so can there only be one of you a time?"
She felt very tired suddenly. "You idiots don't even know what I am."
He shrugged. "You can throw big rocks around and get rid of the undead. That's enough for the Queen. I'm just curious."
He didn't need to know. "It is the law of the ground," she said for the ground. "There must always be One."
"It's neat how you do that echo-ey-voice thing," he said. "So what if another Hellbent showed up? Do you have to fight her?"
"Apparently your Queen's got some books. I bet there's one about Hellbents. Go read it."
"It said you grew from Hellseeds. What was that like?"
"Dwarves don't grow from *seeds,"* she said impatiently. "- Is the elf right? Did you assholes lose whoever it was that fixed me up?"
He raised the places where his eyebrows should have been. "You don't remember her? Great big green orc woman?" Jo didn't remember. "Yeah, well, I guess she kept you asleep most of the time. Her name was Maelga. Getting you into storage here was just about the last thing she did for the Queen."
*"Did* I kill her?" asked Jo. It bothered her. Somewhere inside her, she must remember a person named Maelga, because the idea of hurting her was unpleasant.
"Close." He smiled with teeth. Whatever it was, he was still upset about it. She must have done something.
She said, "And you're gonna try and replace your orc friend with an elf who hates you?"
"Maelga hated me, too," he said. "It's not my job to be likeable. It's my job burn women's flesh off."
"Damn, your Queen really sent the right motherfucking pyromaniac for the fucking job. I am converted to your sociopathic cause. It was that sentence right there that did it."
"Yeah, we're doing well going into day one of your deathwatch. I'm pleased, personally. Now, I'm going to go back down there and make dinner, maybe threaten the elf a little to round out my day. You need anything? Can I pick some of these awful goddamn mushrooms for you?"
"Yeah, gather me a basket of plump helmets, if you can tell them from the avenging angels."
"I can't."
"Then fuck off, who needs you."
-
The next morning, Jo woke up and wandered out to change her bandage to find a bear sitting outside with a basket of mushrooms. She said to the bear, "Where did you even find a basket?"
The bear opened one eye, huffed at her, and closed it again. "Yeah, I know, that's definitely the biggest problem with this situation." She walked over and knelt to examine the basket. "These are actually juvenile tower-caps. Mildly toxic and too woody for me to bite through with my flat omnivore teeth."
Its failure to competently pick mushrooms notwithstanding, the bear had nonetheless wiped its feet, so she retreated back to the bathroom. Might as well clean up before your execution.
The elf was there when she came back out, sitting barefoot and cross-legged beside the drowsing bear and scratching behind its ears. The basket was sitting overturned behind her. Jo said, "Did you pick those? Were you trying to poison me or feed me? Good try, whichever it was, you're about halfway there."
"I'm afraid that I'm unfamiliar with these species," she said. "How is it that they come to grow in this place? I judge them to be subterranean varieties."
"There's about the right level of light and moisture here for them, and Obviousname or someone brought my clothes. They would've been loaded with spores."
The elf's ears folded back in surprise. "Is this density of growth typical?"
"In places where I'm living, yeah. They'd normally be all over the floor and like, in my fucking bed, but something's keeping them out. Mold doesn't even grow on bread in this fucking rock."
"I see. Your power draws these simple organisms to you, that they may die and decay, to create living soil for you to control," said Lenuse thoughtfully. "Of course, the Queen's servants would not permit this. They are careful people, regardless of appearances. For what reason do you think the Moth has brought me to this place?"
"Eh," said Jo. "I guess he wanted to see if he could get us to wear ourselves out fighting each other."
"So lowering our psychological resistance to his own attempts to win control of us," said the elf composedly. "This was my evaluation as well."
Jo said, "I didn't think you guys used knew the word "psychological." I figured you just used tree metaphors or some shit to convey that sort of idea."
"Indeed? I did not believe that dwarves understood tactics with more subtlety than "pour magma on it.""
"Yeah, I mostly don't," agreed Jo. "It's called "lava" when you start pouring it on shit that's aboveground, by the way."
"Excuse me if my language offended. - Well, while it might relieve my feelings to free you and so infuriate the Queen, please understand that she holds my people hostage to my good behavior. I cannot put them at risk in such away." The elf looked at her narrowly. "Unless you have the ability to protect them from her. In that case, we might come to an understanding."
Jo sat down in her chair hard, licking her lips. "Back up and tell me who your people are."
"I am of Nelarealirethelire."
"The Silver Beech." Elf names were such a pile of shit. "You guys aren't far from Nashoncog."
"From where Nashoncog once stood, indeed. We felt the tremors of its death," she said calmly. "And I am sixth in line to the throne. To speak frankly, I would that I were a bit closer - I find the policies of my cousin the King and his son and heir distastefully pacifistic. This is likely why I was made envoy to the Queen of Men. They hoped to use my anger as a bluff, and so conceal their fear."
"You don't seem too angry to me," said Jo, examining the elf's sad eyes and twisting hands.
"Indeed. My face and manner appear weak, to human eyes, and I suppose dwarven as well. Not, I think now, that it would have mattered. The Queen cares only for strength, and she has shown me hers. When she comes, we will be overrun. And so I have temporized with her, and searched for a weapon."
"Damn," said Jo. "This might go to my head. Two years locked up inside a meteor, and all of a sudden I'm popular."
