Kingdom's Fall

Chapter 14, Part 1

The world came back to Ambrose slowly. His senses felt incomplete. He could see movement, and orange-red patches of light; he could hear voices, but the words ran into one another. He could feel the weight of his body, heavy around his chest. He couldn’t feel the pain, which was odd, because he knew there had been pain. Just thinking about it made his heart beat rabbit-quick, and as it did Ambrose rose into consciousness to realise the truth - everything he felt was pain.

He was hanging from a pillar in the main hall of the palace. A loop of rope had been passed round his chest then hooked over an iron mounting, pulling it tight underneath his arms. His breath was shallow, a battle between his body’s demand for air and the ribs that had been broken. Too little, and the urgent need to breathe climbed like panic; too much, and the pain set him gasping, leaving him worse off than he was before. He could not feel his fingers.

The Queen was standing by the throne. She wasn’t looking at him, but she knew he was awake. The smile that played about her lips was the last thing he’d seen, the vicious play of her lips as they peeled back from her teeth, revealing the monster inside her. Standing before her were two men. One was the foreigner that Gray had dragged in, the man who poisoned his horses. The other he didn’t recognise, but he was neatly dressed in the sober, black-coat manner of a clerk. Put in the stables, he was sort of man who would walk on his hands to keep the shit off his shoes. Neither of them looked his way, or gave any indication that they even saw him. Maybe I’m dead, he thought. Maybe I died, and this is what comes after.

“You serve me now.” The Queen’s voice was flat, inflectionless. The two men shared a guilty glance but said nothing. She smiled again, and even though Ambrose couldn’t feel his hands, they trembled. “Do you understand?”

Both men spoke over one another, the agreement rushing out of them.

Swift as thought, the Queen’s hand shot out and back again. The poisoner crumpled to the floor, his palms doubled over against his side. The Queen turned to the other man. “You were saying?”

The clerk lowered his head deferentially. “We live to serve,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “You do.” The Queen turned and stepped up to the throne. “You thought you could use me, didn’t you? You thought we had no way of defending ourselves.”

Ambrose could see the man’s eyes flicker as he tried to think his way out of the corner she was putting him in. “I am not highly placed, my queen. I do not know the reasons why the order-”

“Be quiet.” There was no force in her words, but it stopped him all the same. He knows to fear her, Ambrose thought. He knows what she is.

“It was only a matter of time before one of us survived your summoning,” she said. “When you started picking victims with such-” she paused and lifted her hand, regarding it as if it was a piece of jewelry “-value, our success became inevitable.”

The poisoner had picked himself up, and was standing with one cautious arm covering his side. “The sacrifice needed status,” he said. “The master said that if we used just anyone the blood would be weak.”

“It is as we planned it.”

“But I don’t understand,” he said. “We control the ritual.”

“The summoning is inevitable, but my kindred are not powerless against it. By choosing the price we had to pay, we guided your order’s hand. If your sacrifice was worth little, we sent our weakest. Some of the spirits we sent you were little more than moments old, and as weak as the breeze.”

The black-coat spoke up. “And you are older, majesty?”

The Queen faced him, and there was an ugly joy in her expression. “I am older than the stones of this palace. Not oldest, not by far, but old enough that allowing me to enter this body was a risk for my kind. Had you gained the strength that runs in these veins, your order would have become very powerful indeed. Instead, you are now mine.”