The Year of the Dead Roseby Rachel Parsons |
Table of Contents
Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 17 appear in this issue. |
| Chapter 16 |
Mark Stone kicked his boots off. Next, he threw off his cape. His jacket flew off. Soon he was down to his longjohns. A mile or so before, the saddle bags had gone flying. They would all be replaced; even the horse would be replaced if it expired. But after reading the scroll, he knew that it had to go to the queen, not his cowled patron, but his naked one. And as fast as possible.
He knew of the rumors of war, and what he held taped to his leg was the key to it. He was a mercenary, he relished his commissions, but he knew she would pay, and before that, he was a patriot. Besides, the queen, who he knew was the naked woman, was a beauty. And he knew the way to get a beautiful woman to make love to him was to fix things for her. And this was a killer of a fix for a killer of a woman. Oh, yes.
Past Arbeth Dactyl he flew; past Wynne’s Inn, past the guards at the gate to Caer Rhiannon, who sounded the alarm at the strange intruder, clad only in his underwear.
Elfrod and his men gushed in, crossbows drawn. Stone jumped down; ran toward the main palace doors, ignoring the arrow loops and the flashes in them, waving the parchment. “I am on the queen’s business. She must come. I have news; astonishing news!”
He was being dragged to a cell below the castle, where they kept the insane that would disturb the peace of the palace when one of the men clutched at his throat. Something unseen was fighting on Stone’s behalf. Others were holding their noses and jumping up and down.
“By the pricking of my thumbs, something putrid this way comes,” he heard a disembodied voice say. A misty cloud, with the consistency of spoiled onions, wafted across the lawn.
Stone used the confusion engendered by these weird events to encircle his arms around the arms of his captors, below their elbow joints; he proceeded to punch them both simultaneously in the jaws. He ran toward the opened palace door, looked to and fro, and found himself jerked in one direction. “Go down the side corridor, under the courtrooms; you will find her there,” a voice whispered. “Follow your nose.”
The stench, that of unwashed infant swaddling, hit him as if a physical blow. His eyes tearing at the ammonia, at the sheer rancidness of the odor, at the olfactory horror, he fled to get away. He bounded down the side corridor, under the courtrooms, and, when the directions had been vague, simply let his nose’s well-being be his guide.
He found the queen, as she stood up, placing her hands on her head. She was tearing at her hair. What could only be a shifter started snarling at his presence, its face drawn, its nostrils flaring, its cheeks drawn.
“Your nakedness,” he cried. “You need to read this.”
Startled, not at the form of address, or at her champion, who should not have known who she was or how to find her, but at the disturbance to her peace, at a moment when it was dissolving around her head, she nonetheless grabbed at the tossed scroll. Her eyes widened as she read it.
“Is this authentic?”
“It has cost a man his life to guard it, and nearly cost me my own to procure it. It was placed, by some powerful magic, in a dimension only approachable through a painting.”
“What is it, Rhiannon?” Rosalyn asked.
“If real, then it changes everything.” To Ioseff, “Escort me to the Plains of the Immortal. I will lead the men.”
She left everyone in an uproar, especially Mark Stone, who wondered what in Nifleheim he was going to do now. No one had told the guards that he wasn’t insane; they had arrived and he found himself being dragged by his heels to the Tower. There he was told by the physician Vivienne that it was a sign of brain fever to hallucinate foul odors that no one else could smell. She proceeded to crack his skull open with a hatchet to alleviate the swelling.
Copyright © 2007 by Rachel Parsons
