"Because he plans to play with you first," said the other larger figure from the shadows.
"What do you mean?"
The machine didn't move, as if the effort of speaking was draining it of its last energy. "He knows you will try to escape with us, but he has depleted our energy stores so that we can only move slowly and, before long, would become inert. He wants to hunt us."
"I don't understand,” said Bill. "If he wants sport, why cripple you?"
The machine’s response was barely audible. "He does not want sport," it said. "He wants to kill you in front of everyone, and for that he needs the fantasy of a hunt. But you have no chance unless you leave us here, and quickly."
Bill sat back and shook his head as Sebaceous jumped out of his pocket and scampered over to standby the elf’s seemingly lifeless head. "So he cut off the elf's leg so there was no chance of her outrunning him, especially with four crippled robots."
"This Faerie King, he is utter bastard," said Sebaceous.
Bill noticed a movement in the darkness next to one of the machines. He pushed a little heat into his hands to illuminate the corner and saw that one of the smaller figures, no larger than a 10-year-old child, had slumped across the legs of its parent, who remained inert as if unable to move.
Bill got down onto his knees and crawled into the corner. He grabbed the shoulder and arm of the little figure and pulled it upright but it collapsed forward, pivoting at the waist. When he put his hand on its back he felt the metal plate that each of the machines wore. Within the plate was a circular groove that, presumably, was where they connected to their power source. As he ran his fingers around it he noticed the machine stir and, when he pushed it back against the wall the feeble glow emanating from its head had, it seemed to him, become a little brighter.
"Sebaceous," Bill said, "the power source you spoke of, the one that is hidden – you said it was the source of the elemental power of the staff and the other objects in my world, is it also the source of my power?"
The little lizard skipped across the floor from where he'd been nursing the elf. "I does not know master Bill. But legends say it is the source of all magic in all three worlds, so maybe."
"Perhaps I can replenish their energy then," Bill said. "If I push some of my power into them instead of into my hands."
Sebaceous shrugged. "It might work, boss, but you are fire wizard and they are kindling. If you tries it, you might be left with nice warm fire, but no square man."
Bill sat back next to the slumped figures. Was it worth the risk? Sebaceous was right, Bill was a fire wizard and wood doesn't mix well with flame. But if they stayed here, they'd likely be left to die; or whatever happens to these machines when their power is entirely exhausted.
He made his decision, crawled over to the large figure in the corner and with a huge effort pulled the heavy frame away from the wall. The machine grunted but didn't in any way try to stop him. In the darkness Bill felt for the plate and inserted all five fingers of one hand into the groove. Then as gently as he could manage, he built up the elemental power of flame and let it pass into his hands and through his fingers into the machine.
The effect was almost instantaneous, there was a faint sound of gears grinding and cogs turning and then an increasing whine until, after a few moments and as Bill was beginning to feel drained, the machine sat back and turned its glowing head to him.
"Thank you," it said. "Now will you help my wife and children?"
Bill nodded and got wearily to his feet before kneeling beside the other large figure and repeating the process. Each time he did it he felt more exhausted until, by the time he had revived the second of the two children, he was dead on his feet.
"I don't think I can move quite yet," he whispered.
The machine that he now knew was the mother of the family, the one that had been cradling the elf, spoke. "We must go now," she said, her voice now steady and the glow from her eyes lighting the little room, "but we will carry you."
"And the elf?" he managed.
The male machine turned its boxy head towards him. "Do you wish us to?"
Bill didn't have the energy to think about it, he just knew that it wasn't right to leave Stingzlikeabee in the hands of Humunculus, a creature who was now descending to new depths of cruelty and would surely torture her to death.
"Yes," he said, and felt himself being raised up in strong metallic arms as he drifted away.
Chapter 22
IT FELT AS THOUGH HE were in a fast-flowing river, lolling back and forth to a thump, thump, thumping like rocks turning over in a gravel bed. He was drowning! Bill sat up, opened his mouth wide and gasped in huge grateful breaths.
“Be still,” the metallic voice said from a foot above him.
Now he remembered. “Where are we?” he said, as the movement ceased and he felt himself being lowered to the ground.
“We have outrun them.”
Bill swayed a little as he steadied himself and then looked up into the soulful yellow glow. “How is that possible?”
Another voice spoke and Bill spun round to see the machine he identified as the father looming over him, the two smaller figures standing alongside. “I do not understand why, but we did not feel fatigue when we should have.”
“We can usually only travel a little way from our village before we must turn around. We ran because we could think of no other course to take and we thought that the further we got, the better chance you had of escape,” said the first machine. “But we passed the markers at the limit of our range and did not feel the usual fatigue. Those that followed dared not go further, not even that poison you call Humunculus. That was over an hour ago; dawn approaches and yet I feel as though I am freshly charged.”
They had stopped on the outskirts of a little wood that sprung out of the grass. “Where are the draconi?” he asked.
“They follow,” the mother said. “They have spread out to scout the land to either side. Their leader said to stop when you awoke and wait for him. My name is Nessa, by the way. Thank you for rescuing us. This is Daven, my husband. Beside him stand Finlay and Bette, our children. At least, they were our children before… this.”
Bill followed the machine family into the trees, picking his way carefully in the faint moonlight. He turned around to see two moons in the sky, reminding him that he really wasn’t in his own world anymore, however similar it seemed superficially. As if to confirm this, he could see several pairs of glowing eyes regarding him from beneath the trees looking, more than anything, like a family of depressed owls. His heart sank as he crunched his way towards them. If he’d had any lingering doubt that living souls lurked within those metal and wooden shells, he doubted no longer, and he felt the burden sink upon him. He wondered whether he’d ever surface from the weight of responsibility.
He felt something pull on his leg, gave a cry and crashed back into the hard body of a machine. A little face appeared at nose level, took off its hat and bowed. “Friend Bill, you awake. It makes me so happy!”
“Sebaceous,” Bill sighed, “you scared the bananas out of me.”
Sebaceous grinned, his pointy teeth seeming to have a luminescence of their own. “Humans is so blind in the dark, like great mammoths stomping around. What’s bananas?”
“A type of cigar, I think, but anyway, are you all here? What did you find?”
“They have gone back to village, no machines anywhere. But he is very angry, friend Bill, very angry indeed.”
Bill smiled. Yes, Humunculus would be apoplectic that his carefully laid plan had gone so spectacularly wrong. Bill’s grim satisfaction in pissing off the Faerie King was interrupted by a groan in the darkness near his feet. “Stingzlikeabee!”
He knelt down beside the little figure, jerking his hand back as it touched something wet and sticky.
The machine called Nessa had bent to look down on the elf, the glow from her eyes providing a wan illumination of the pathetic scene. “Why did you go back to the s
ettlement?” Bill whispered.
Stingzlikeabee’s eyes flickered open. “Revenge,” she muttered, “for my sister.”
Bill sighed. “What happened?”
“I crept in. I found him. I slashed at him but his copper defeated me. He took me and flung me into the cell. Then, later, he came back and, and…”
She lapsed into silence and went still.
“We must take the mistress back to her people,” said the voice of Sebaceous.
“What about Humunculus? What if he finds the source?”
“He may search long and not find it. My mistress will not survive without help.”
Bill settled down onto the floor of the wood, gazing eastward through gaps between the trees as the sky began to lighten. “I wonder how he plans to find it? I can’t imagine he thinks he’ll stumble across it.”
“Two ways there are,” Sebaceous said as he stood between Bill and the prone body of the elf. “Either he captures one of the high priests of the elfs, or he has something containing magic that will point to the source. Magic attracts magic, they say. But such things do not exist freely in our world and do not exist at all in the Dark.”
“Magical containers? Like a staff?”
He felt Sebaceous’s gaze intensify. “Yes, do you know of such a thing?”
In his mind, Bill pictured the staff in the corner of Brianna’s bedroom, back at Hemlock’s Farm. He’d thought it would be safe there. But if Humunculus was after it, then Brianna was in danger. “I have to go back!” he said.
#
An arrow fizzed passed Gramma’s face and disappeared into the undergrowth. “Charge!” called a voice and suddenly the hedgerows were evacuating soldiers onto the road.
Chortley swung to face the attack, drawing his sword and scything it through the air. The merry men had been left at their forest base to harass travelling nobility, so it was just him, the witches and their menfolk.
He sidestepped a spear thrust and hacked down, watching as his attacker rolled away writhing. The crest of the Fitzmichaels flashed in the morning sun. He stepped away. “I will not fight my own people!” he roared. And then he spotted the face peering over the hedgerow. “De Grey! You I will kill!”
The attackers stood, weapons drawn, between the hedge and the travellers. Gramma’s face could have melted a teapot.
“Kill them!” screamed the panicked noble. “Or face the wrath of the Countess Aggrapella!”
The men edged cautiously forward.
“I will not fight my own people,” Chortley repeated, before dropping his sword with a dramatic flourish and holding his hands out.
This didn’t have the intended effect. A great brute of a man, presumably the sergeant of this company of irregulars, raised his axe, screamed a challenge and ran at Chortley, followed by at least a dozen others. Just as he raised his axe to strike Chortley down, he was blown off his feet and propelled, with deadly force, into a tree beside the road. The tree swung its lower branches and the man’s body skidded along the compacted earth until it stopped with its head twisted at a lethal angle.
Velicity strode forward like a vengeful demon, her clothes billowing and a light in her eyes that Chortley remembered for the rest of his life. It was an expression he decided he never wanted to see again. The attackers scattered, some running down the road to be poleaxed by twanging branches, others to discover how unwise it is to flee over a river bridge when the enemy has a water witch.
Brianna, Flem and, somewhat reluctantly, Willy Clitheroe, ran at the remaining soldiers, weapons drawn.38
Chortley picked up his sword and ran into the hedgerow, aiming for the spot that had previously been occupied by Sebastian De Grey. He arrived just in time to see the wretch scramble onto a horse. Chortley knew it was hopeless and contemplated taking out his rage on the soldiers scrambling through the trees after their leader.
“Oh no you bloody well don’t!” Gramma cried.
There was a sound like a door opening for the first time in a thousand years and Chortley watched as a massive branch swung out and knocked De Grey off his horse. He leapt through the hedge, ignoring the foot soldiers as they scattered in trajectories that would not bring them near enough to their leader to defend him. Chortley grabbed De Grey’s coat as he struggled to his feet and deposited him on the ground, looking upwards.
“Don’t kill me!” he whimpered.
Chortley lowered the point of his sword so that it hovered over De Grey’s nose. “And why not? You were sent to kill me, after all.”
“You have no idea what she’s like! She was very … displeased when I returned from the forest. This was my last chance. My life is over.”
“Indeed,” Chortley said, “then there’s no point in prolonging things is there? Might as well get straight to the point.”
A fresh breeze wafted up behind him. “No, Chortley, you must not kill him.”
Chortley’s shoulders sagged. His girlfriend had transformed from merciless goddess to her more usual bleeding heart at an inconvenient time. “What makes you think I was going to put this cowardly thing out of his misery?”
“History,” Mother Hemlock said.
“I wasn’t going to kill him,” Chortley hissed out of the corner of his mouth, “I just wanted him to think I was!”
Velicity put her hand on his shoulder and Chortley cooled down and warmed up at the same time. “Don't worry, my love, I’m not going to stop you hurting him. Really quite a lot,” she said, turning a cold smile on the nobleman grovelling in the dirt at her feet.
“So, my sister wanted my head did she?” Chortley said, looking down at De Grey.
“She said she’d prefer you to be returned alive,” De Grey whimpered. “Her magnificence said she wanted to speak with you.”
Chortley grunted. “I’ll bet she did. She wouldn’t want to waste the opportunity to gloat at me before she had me executed. But, if that’s true, you snivelling worm, why did your men charge at us?”
De Grey was silent for a moment as his terrified gaze passed from Velicity to Gramma and finally, reluctantly, alighted on Mother Hemlock.
“Ah, I see,” Chortley said. “I was to be taken alive, but anyone with me was to be disposed of.”
“I think there may be more to it than that, lad,” Mother Hemlock said. “I reckon this was a witch-hunt and it was us three what was the real targets. Ain’t that right, mister? After all, plenty of kindling around ‘ere to build a fire, ain’t there?”
Sebastian De Grey shook his head furiously and coughed as the cloud of dust he’d generated got into his nose.
“Oh, I reckon I’m right,” Mother Hemlock said.
“You usually do,” Gramma responded. “I mean, you usually are, Jessie.”
Mother Hemlock bent down, grimacing a little as her back twinged, to focus her glare on the shaking De Grey. “Now then, my lad, I’ve got your number. You’re a coward through and through, so the only reason you’d ‘ave been prepared to take us on would ‘ave been if you’re more scared of this Aggrapella woman than you were of me. I think, perhaps, you need a little educatin’”
De Grey shook his head in hopeless terror. Then he felt a tingling in his extremities that became a numb sensation as if his skin was stretching tight. He gazed, with horror, as his fingers began to swell until they looked like fat sausages on the end of a hand that, itself, was ballooning. The numbness turned to pain as his skin stretched and then, quite suddenly, a split tore along the back of his hand, blood raining down on him as he shook in his agony. De Grey screamed.
“I think that’ll do,” Mother Hemlock said, wiping the sweat from her eyes. “Now I suggest you go and find your men and make them understand that, despite what they might remember, you never found us. You’ll wait a week before crawling back to your mistress with the bad news that we’ve disappeared. We are witches, after all.”
De Grey nodded as he held his wounded hand and sobbed. The bleeding had slowed to a trickle but Mother Hemlock had no doubt he’d c
arry a scar for the rest of his life. However long, or short, that turned out to be.
“Was that entirely necessary?” Velicity whispered to the senior witch as they turned away.
“Oh, I think so. Some folks only respond to fear. That wretch has used it as a weapon on others and he’s only just learnin’ that it ain’t so nice being on the other side of the spear.”
“Aye,” Gramma said, “it’s all about lama.39”
Mother Hemlock nodded to Flem who, along with Brianna and Willy had kept a safe distance. “Shall we be off then?”
Flem’s response was lost as a scream echoed around the roadside. They turned to see Chortley ambling towards them, the writhing form of Sebastian De Grey rolling back and forth, his hands to his face.
Chortley looked at Velicity’s shocked expression. He shook his head. “I should have done that a long time ago, he’s not going to be able to use his face as a weapon of seduction any more. Finally, his looks match his twisted, cowardly soul. Come on.”
Chapter 23
IGNIS BEL THREW THE SCRAP of paper down and turned back to the fire, his brow furrowed and his mind racing. An unkind associate (he didn’t have many friends) might suggest that brooding was his natural state, but this was different. He sat in his oak chair as the shimmering amber of the firelight animated his frozen features. A passing islander from the warm tropical oceans peering in at the window might have been inspired to go home and create a massive stone head to stare out to sea with just such an expression as that worn by Ignis Bel that night. More likely a passing piss artist would use the man who sat and pondered as the inspiration for a piece of modern art involving a mannequin in a chair with a sword across his lap and entitled The Worrier. Aha ha.
Ignis had a network of contacts across the country. It wasn't by any means as comprehensive or as professionally ruthless as that of the Brotherhood, but it served to ensure that he was always up-to-date with the news. And, since the death of the count, the news had been unremittingly bad.
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