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“Speak,” said Queen Mab, neither agreeing nor disagreeing for the moment.
“You did not inform us of your return, Your Majesty,” I said carefully. “We would have sent envoys to welcome you home.”
“We have returned,” said Queen Mab. “Let all the worlds tremble and all that live beware.”
“Well, yes,” I said. “Quite. So, what’s happened to Oberon and Titania?”
“Is that what you came here to ask, Drood?”
“No; just making conversation.”
“They are gone. Mention them not in our presence.”
“All right,” I said. “Where have you been, Your Majesty? You’ve been gone a long time.”
“Oberon sent us away.” Her dark red mouth widened slowly in a terrible smile. She had the look of the Devil contemplating a new sin. “He really should have had us killed, but he always was too sentimental for his own good. It took us a long time to claw our way back and take our long-anticipated revenges on all those who betrayed us . . .”
“Where did he send you?” I said, honestly interested. “Where could he send someone of your undoubted power?”
“Where all the bad things go, little Drood. He sent us to Hell. Damned us to the Pit, to endure the eternal Inferno.” She was still smiling her awful smile, her golden eyes fixed on me. And even inside my impenetrable armour, I could feel beads of sweat popping out on my forehead. “While we were in Hell, little Drood, during our long sojourn in the Houses of Pain, we met your precious witch, Molly Metcalf. Such a sweet little thing. Shall we inform you of the deals she made, of all the awful things she agreed to, in return for power?”
“Let us make a deal, Your Majesty,” I said. “I will not talk of Oberon and Titania, and you will not talk of my Molly. Yes?”
“Speak, little Drood,” said Queen Mab. “Tell us what brings you here to our recovered court, to our noble presence. Tell us what brings you here with the blood of so many of our noble cousins still wet and dripping on your armoured hands.”
“Ah,” I said. “I wondered when we’d get around to that. They attacked me, Your Majesty. They really should have known better. I might have been rogue at the time, but I was still a Drood, and they were just elves. Even if they had been armed with strange matter by a traitor within my family.”
Peaseblossom hissed loudly and started to rise up again. Queen Mab shot him a glance, and he flinched and fell back as though he’d been hit.
“Keep your pets on a leash, Your Majesty,” I said. “Or I might find it necessary to discipline them.”
The Queen considered me silently for an uncomfortably long moment. There was no sound in the Unseeli Court apart from the heavy breathing of my companions. I should have been able to hear the massed breathing of the thousands of watching elves, but there was nothing. I didn’t look back, but I knew they were still blocking the only way out, and it was highly unlikely they’d step aside for me again without Mab’s command. Unless I won the argument with the Queen, got the information I needed, and struck some kind of deal that would get me and my companions out of here with our organs still on the inside. The odds were not good, but I’m a Drood, and when you wear the golden armour, the odds do what they’re told, if they know what’s good for them. In the end Queen Mab nodded very slightly, and I felt a great weight rise off me. She was ready to listen, at least.
“I’m here about the USS Eldridge,” I said. “An American naval vessel that found its way here in 1943. You weren’t on the Ivory Throne at the time, Your Majesty, but I’ll bet the Herald was around back then. I need to know what happened to this ship; how it was able to come here and what happened to it while it was here.”
Queen Mab turned her great head slowly to look at the Herald, who bowed low in return.
“I do indeed remember the occasion, Your Majesty. Would it please you to have me tell of it?”
“Show them,” said Queen Mab.
The Herald clenched his left hand into a fist. Razor-sharp thorns burst out the back of his hand. Golden blood splashed onto the floor before him, quickly spreading out to form a golden scrying pool. And in that pool appeared images from the past, showing all that had befallen the unfortunate USS Eldridge.
“Your world was at war,” whispered the Herald, his golden eyes fixed on the images forming in the scrying pool. “Its very boundaries weakened by the sheer extent of the savagery and slaughter. So when one of your ships came knocking at our door, we were tempted and let it in. Such cu
“We played with them for ages, teasing and tormenting as the impulse took us, delighting in their pain and horror. They cried so prettily. And then it occurred to us what a fine jest it would be to alter the ship and its crew in subtle, deadly ways and send them home again. To corrupt them body and soul and send them back to your world as a spiritual plague ship . . . We debated for hours, searching for something especially sweet and cruel and amusing . . . but that delay gave the crew of the ship time to recover. The Eldridge’s captain took control again, roused his crew, and had them reactivate their cu
The images were clear and sharp in the scrying pool. The USS Eldridge was heading out to sea. Their decks were slick and ru
Strange energies began to glow and crackle around the Eldridge as the powerful machinery packed into the compartments below began to operate. And that was when the elves attacked.
Huge three-masted sailing ships surged out after the Eldridge and soon overtook it, though there was scarcely wind enough to stir the massive sails. They circled lazily around the Eldridge, taunting the ship and its crew until the sailors ma
The elven vessels fell back, raging and frustrated, and the Eldridge sailed on.
Elf lords and ladies laughed merrily high in the sky, mounted on the back of a dragon. Not the ugly wyrms they’d been forced to use on Earth, but the real thing. Impossibly large, it hovered over the Eldridge like an eagle over its prey. The ship’s guns fired but could not touch it. The dragon opened its great mouth, and raging streams of liquid fire washed over the decks of the Eldridge, consuming sailors, blowing up guns and ammunition, and scorching the metalwork. The elves on the dragon’s back unlimbered strange unearthly weapons and blew great holes in the Eldridge’s superstructure. Sailors died in the hundreds, but some still ma
The captain kept his ship going, heading right into the heat of the attack even as his bridge disintegrated about him, heading doggedly towards the door he knew had to be there, the door that would take his ship and his remaining crew home. A door out of the Hell he had brought them to. Even as his ship fell apart around him and his deck burned with dragonfire, even as his skin blistered and blackened, the captain battled on.