Paper & Blood

by Kevin Hearne

  We weren’t busting out with a war cry or anything, so they weren’t really aware of our approach. They were looking instead at the sigil agents in the cage, who had popped open those sigils. The agents’ bodies shuddered as strength and uncanny agility flowed through their systems. Then, in a move that understandably drew the monsters’ attention, because it certainly drew mine, Wu Mei-ling crouched and leapt straight up to the top of one of the logs in the stockade wall, landing perfectly on an inhospitable surface as if she had been bitten by a radioactive spider recently and was not, in fact, in her eighties or nineties or beyond—I really had no idea how old she was, just that she was of a completely different generation from mine.

  Her apprentice, Hsin-ye, followed suit, as did Shu-hua, leaving Buck to admire them and award them some golf claps. He was woozy and extremely low on energy, so the act of looking up and clapping at the same time caused him to fall over backward.

  I was quickly closing on a cheetah beetle, Officer Campbell and Roxanne to my left, Ya-ping to my right, and for an instant, I think, I felt every iota of worry and angst that Ya-ping felt. Here was the most mortal of cusps, a battle in which one could emerge triumphant, or wounded, or not at all, cut down due to a misstep or an unseen flanking maneuver or simply being overmatched. I really didn’t want to die in Australia, but I could—and so could we all—for sigils did not confer immortality, and if Ogma was truly the shadowy puppet master behind all this, then he clearly intended it to be a mortal end for whoever came to rescue the hostages. It was an instant of horror and hope, a pregnant moment where a miracle or a disaster might be born.

  Our element of surprise was ruined by Officer Campbell, who saw the superhero acrobatics of the hostages like the rest of us but was mentally unprepared to witness such feats, or indeed such monstrosities collected beneath them.

  “What the fuck!” he exclaimed, and the cheetah beetles heard it and whirled, their mandibles glinting in the afternoon sun.

  Officer Campbell’s profound disbelief layered on top of the screams of demons was the soundtrack for the next nine seconds, as he cycled through the only phrase he could utter to deal with what he was seeing while he batted away beetle mandibles with his baton. “What! The! Fuck! What! The! Fuck!” he cried, impacts landing with each word, just defending himself from a murderous chimera that he had no hope of defeating. Peripherally, I saw Roxanne and Ya-ping leap into the air, but I had my own cheetah beetle to face.

  Cheetah beetles, I discovered, are fast, and when the mandibles come for your torso, you don’t want to be there. I spun away from the initial lunge and whacked at the outside of the mandible with my cane, but the creature just swiveled its head to the left and walloped me broadside just above the hip—no way to avoid it. As it pretty much hit my center of gravity, I was tossed off balance and fell onto the hillside, which turned out to feel nothing at all like an air mattress or a field of marshmallows. It followed up by trying to spear me against the ground, but I rolled away and got a deep scratch across the middle of my back instead of a mandible to the heart. The monster’s need to pull out of the earth and then lunge again gave me just enough time to stand and wield my cane like a baseball bat. When it tried that knockdown maneuver again to get me on the ground, I brought the bat overhead to smash the mandible down with the cold iron–infused carbon-steel end. It actually cracked, but the creature’s strength and momentum still forced the cane back up, and I had to retreat a few steps. The insect head shrieked and the cheetah body danced back, but it was positioning itself to charge at me with the right mandible acting as a lance. I didn’t want to give it any kind of running start. So I ran at it instead—just a few steps—and then tried something that was quite frankly inspired by Mei-ling. I forget sometimes that the strength and speed sigils really do wondrous things for a short while, and the limitations of what I can do are more mental than physical. I bunched my legs and launched myself airborne, straight over the cheetah beetle’s head, which it did not know how to handle. The neck didn’t have a lot of vertical mobility, so it tried to back up to get me in front of it again. I just wanted some part of it underneath me when I descended, because I was doing another overhead strike with the carbon-steel end coming down first. It wound up crushing the spine, instantly buckling the back legs and ruining its mobility. It wouldn’t be charging anymore, so it was effectively neutralized.

  I searched for another target—there were plenty—and saw that Ya-ping had efficiently dispatched her cheetah beetle with her sai and Roxanne had somehow defeated the one that had been menacing Officer Campbell. The officer was standing there gobsmacked as she squared up against a couple of cassowary cobras in the shallow waters of the creek, and Ya-ping was rushing to meet one of them as well.

  The three captives were still perched atop pillars of the stockade, looking down at the monsters and being looked at in return by dozens of hungry eyes. That was all to the good: Keeping the bulk of the chimeras occupied gave us a chance to advance without being overwhelmed. And the captives weren’t armed, so unless they felt there was some advantage to dropping into a churning mosh pit of death, holding the attention of the monsters was the best possible strategic move while we moved in from behind.

  The wound in my back burned, and I could feel blood sheeting down my skin to the waistband of my trousers. I took the opportunity to pop open a Sigil of Knit Flesh before proceeding. It would stop the blood loss and heal up the muscle and even close up any wounds I received in the immediate future.

  I targeted one of the cassowary cobras to charge next, since three of them had decided to gang up on Roxanne while one was hyperaware that Ya-ping was inbound and focused on her.

  Roxanne was holding her own, dodging their strikes and delivering wild roundhouse kicks from underneath that caught them in the breast and knocked the bird-things backward. Immediately after one of these maneuvers, on the subsequent follow-through she pushed off with both hands from the ground and spun like a figure skater launching herself from the ice, except upside down, so that her legs caught one of the cassowary cobras at the base of its neck. Her rotary motion effectively wrenched the head abruptly to the right and torqued it to the ground with the twin forces of her kinetic momentum and gravity. Once she’d wrestled it to the earth, Roxanne ruthlessly stomped on the cobra head with her booted foot before it could strike, then pivoted to avoid a leaping attack from another. She was grinning.

  “What the fuck?” Officer Campbell said. “I know you said you wanted battle, but you fight way better than any SES volunteer should.”

  The others missed what happened next, but I didn’t. Roxanne’s grin disappeared and her eyes flashed red briefly, and she said in a deep throaty voice, “You should not have noticed that, Carter Campbell.”

  Was that his first name? I didn’t think he’d ever volunteered it. The two cassowary cobras who’d been targeting Roxanne decided abruptly that the officer was more of a sure thing and charged toward him.

  Seeing that he’d be outnumbered and that he had no special strength or speed, I rushed to intercept and did manage to trip up one of the creatures by extending my cane between its running legs. But the other launched itself through the air at the officer, and he was so worried about a bite from the cobra fangs that he didn’t block the much more dangerous talons, which have killed more than a few humans. His vest protected his torso, but a talon dragged down below the belt and opened a vertical gash along the top of his left thigh. Campbell cried out and went down.

  I thought I could still save him if I could get to him in time, but the cassowary cobra I’d tripped blocked my path and I had to deal with it, which meant swinging like it was the world’s biggest cricket ball. I broke its breastbone and it hissed and collapsed to the ground. I was just in time to see the other monster attack again, and this time the talon raked down Campbell’s face and neck, tearing open his throat.

  “No!” I shouted, and rushed the creat
ure, only to be beaten to it by Roxanne. She caught it by the neck and separated it from the body with brute force, tossing it aside as the carcass toppled over. She knelt next to Officer Campbell, and I searched my pocket for another Sigil of Knit Flesh.

  “It’s too late,” she said. “He’s gone. And we have incoming anyway.”

  I spun around and saw that we’d drawn some attention: Ya-ping’s effectiveness and Officer Campbell’s cry, coupled with my own, had alerted some chimeras around the stockade that there were soft and meaty munchies within reach. Or maybe they smelled the blood.

  “Did you just do what I think you did?” I asked aloud. There was no time for the phone. We had mere seconds before the fight came to us.

  “That was a huge mistake,” Roxanne said, a phrase very rarely uttered by any deity that I knew of. But it came out all scratchy, and she heard it, then blinked and consciously switched back to the smooth Australian accent. “I don’t want to be the Chooser of the Slain. I don’t want to be her again.”

  Which made me wonder if she had a choice.

  There were kangaroo lions and monkey lizards, armadillo cats and camel shrikes, a hippo gator and an actual owlbear, who all wanted a bite of Officer Campbell. I held my ground, barely, getting winded and cut up and punctured high in the chest by the beak of a camel shrike even with my advantages, and was only able to hold my ground because of the absolute slaughter that Roxanne unleashed. Ya-ping successfully leapt over most of the opposition to give Shu-hua one of her sai, and then my colleague descended from the pillar to join the fray. Once a tiny bit of space was created, Mei-ling and Hsin-ye also came down and armed themselves with river rocks, but I didn’t see much of what they did, since I had plenty to occupy my attention. And somewhere, downriver, Connor and Nadia were still doing something to create a chorus of howls and roars.

  The demons fought ferociously, and the number disadvantage nearly overwhelmed us, but the Sigils of Iron Gall helped tremendously, as did an incognito goddess of death who was conflicted about her identity but willing to work through her issues after the monsters were dead. The Sigils of Agile Grace and Muscular Brawn faded just after we slew the last one, and we were all exhausted, bloody, and bedraggled. A roar downstream reminded us that we hadn’t really won yet. We hadn’t even seen the true threat.

  But Ya-ping, at least, looked mightily relieved. She hadn’t screwed up. She’d followed through, done what she was supposed to, and rescued Sifu Lin. With a temporary lull in the action, she beamed at Shu-hua and got a smile and a hug in return. It was genuine affection between them, and it pleased me to no end seeing Ya-ping vindicated and validated. Then she pulled out her phone, presented it to Shu-hua, and said, “Call Sara. She’s worried you might be dead.”

  Shu-hua gestured downstream at the unseen threat, hidden by a bend and some trees. “Well, I might be very soon.”

  “So tell her that, Sifu. But tell her quickly that you’re alive and thinking of her now, and then we’ll go.”

  Rather than waste time arguing, Shu-hua made the practical (and correct) decision to get it done and punched in the number already saved in Ya-ping’s phone. I took the opportunity to take a quick look around to make sure there were no other threats, except the unseen one downstream, and made a mental note to come back for Officer Campbell. We gathered together in the creek and decided to proceed as a group as soon as Shu-hua rang off with Sara, which was really twenty seconds of reassurances, a declaration that she was foremost in her heart and thoughts, and a promise to call again later.

  “Oi, MacBharrais,” Buck said from inside the stockade. He was sitting down and looked half asleep. “That was quite the bumptious brouhaha. Wore me out just watching it. Toss in one of yer bars made of shite and nuts, will ye? I’m really low on petrol here.”

  I did so and Hsin-ye said, “I appreciate you for getting us out of there, Buck Foi. I know you’re exhausted right now, but I think you represent a strong argument in favor of sigil agents contracting hobgoblins to honorable service.”

  “Honorable service!” Buck repeated. “Ye hear that, MacBharrais? I serve honorably. If ye didnae hear that, I guarantee ye’re gonnay from now on, because I’ll be reminding ye on a regular basis.”

  I wanted to ask Hsin-ye about the health of Cowslip, the ailing pixie that we’d left in her care after the poor thing had suffered mightily at the hands of an odious scientist, Dr. Alex Larned, but there wasn’t time for that when we still had a situation to attend to downstream.

  Mei-ling said, “Speaking of being really low on supplies—how do we stand on sigils?”

  “I have some,” Ya-ping said.

  [I am out of Brawn and Grace but have some assorted healing and memory sigils.]

  My answer was obviously not one Mei-ling was looking for, because she turned to Ya-ping and asked, “Do you have Brawn and Grace?”

  “Yes. But not enough for everyone. I have three copies of each and there are six of us.”

  “I do not require one,” Roxanne said, and we paused so that Roxanne could be introduced to the former captives. The decision was that we sigil agents would use the sigils; Roxanne and the apprentices would do without.

  Tactically our best move was to cross the creek and approach from the opposite side of where Connor and Nadia were attacking. Flanking is the most basic method of outmaneuvering an opponent, and sometimes they were prepared for it. But sometimes they weren’t, and so it must be tried.

  We crossed the creek and climbed perhaps five meters up the opposite slope to put some ferns and tree trunks between us and the bank. Then we crept downstream toward the sound of chaos, hoping we’d see a quick, clear path to victory.

  After seventy meters, we saw the chaos.

  And I saw no path to victory at all.

  The various Irish legends surrounding Caoránach that I’d surreptitiously looked up on my phone—some pagan, some Christianized with Saint Patrick stepping in as the hero—agreed in general terms that she met her end at Loch Dearg in Ireland, a lake that turned red with her blood. Her death in that place had been confirmed for me by Roxanne, so I discounted the variations of the tale that said she survived.

  Her origin, likewise, varied depending on the storyteller, but the one I believed based on what I was seeing was that she had been trapped inside the thigh bone of a hag, and upon the hag’s death, people were warned not to break that thigh bone or something monstrous would result. Which meant, of course, some utter git with gelatin for brains broke it anyway—the stories I read ascribed it to one of the Fianna named Conan.

  Out of the splintered bone, released from a moist cocoon of marrow, a small hairy worm dropped to the ground and began to grow with unnatural speed into the oilliphéist known as Caoránach. She was naturally quite hungry, after having no sustenance for so long and growing so fast, and so began a binge that consumed most of the cattle of Ulster.

  Not a thick steak or a couple of hamburgers, mind: cattle. Her unit of consumption was cattle, as in more than a single cow at a sitting. If she had a stomach capable of housing the chewed-up flesh of two whole cows, she had to be pretty huge. And she was.

  I don’t know how large a creature has to be in order to be counted as a kaiju—bigger than a blue whale, or ten elephants, or what—but I thought Caoránach might qualify. She was certainly in blue-whale territory, easily stretching thirty meters from tail to snout, and I guessed she weighed close to a hundred fifty metric tons. Scaled and glittering, she would not be heaving that bulk about quickly, especially since her legs seemed built more for swimming or, at best, dragging herself along than for high-speed movement.

  The scales were mostly greyish but reflected some colors in the sun, with more colors rippling and glinting about the neck and head, which would make her quite beautiful rendered in artwork. She had that elegant sort of dragon’s head, with long nostrils and sharp biting teeth that pointed both up
and down outside the lips when the mouth was closed, and opalescent eyes with a dark vertical pupil. The hair from her brief time as a worm, if it had ever been hair, was now reduced to the occasional thin spine sticking out between her scales as another line of defense.

  Her primary defense, however, was shitting demons in the creek. And that was our problem.

  I’d thought earlier that the noise coming from this area had been Connor and Nadia landing a hit on Caoránach, but now it was clear they’d never even touched her. She couldn’t move quickly or defend herself well on land, so she surrounded herself with fast-moving monsters to do the fighting for her, and they were engaged with the Iron Druid and my deadly accountant on the other side of the creek, somewhat elevated on the hillside. They needed the advantage of the high ground, for they were barely holding off the attack, much less making any progress toward the Mother of Demons.

  Caoránach was producing new monsters quickly, and they in turn had been producing much of the noise, either dying at the hands of Connor and Nadia or being born in the creek. The great wyrm had partially rolled to the left, exposing the right side of her underbelly, and there, with a talon, she had opened up a red line across her chest. Blood oozed rather than dripped from it, dense stuff closer to syrup than water. She regularly swiped at it and then dangled a claw over the creek, letting blood drip from the end like water from a stalactite. Simultaneously, she spoke thickly in a sibilant language while giving birth in the creek at a ridiculous rate, her body rippling and shuddering behind her rear pair of legs. The demon spawn were washed downstream, and then, where her blood dripped into the water, the creatures erupted into unnatural growth and emerged shrieking from the water before charging uphill to fight the Iron Druid and Nadia.

  I had no doubt the two of them would not tire—Connor would be supplying them both with energy from the earth. And it was doubtful that Caoránach would tire, but we would. We needed to figure out how to get through that horde of defenders—for it was a horde, larger than the one surrounding the stockade, and there was no approach to Caoránach that wasn’t defended, except for the space directly in front of her where new demons rose from the water, matured in blood. I found myself wishing we’d had the foresight to bring the arsenal of Cletus Joe Bob MacCutcheon to a fight like this. Some iron bullets would come in handy right now.