The Dire King

by William Ritter

  Virgule nodded graciously.

  “Before we go,” I said, “I don’t suppose you know the fastest route to the Mag Mell from here, do you?”

  Virgule stiffened, and he narrowed his eyes. “What did you just say?”

  “The Mag Mell?” I repeated, wondering if I had said it correctly.

  Virgule’s expression darkened. “Is that some sort of threat? The Mag Mell is a fairy’s ultimate reward. It is where the noblest and bravest of our kind go when they are dead. The fastest route to the Mag Mell”—he fixed me with a grim gaze—“is death on the battlefield.”

  A shiver tickled up my spine and set the hair on my neck on end.

  “My associate was only joking, of course,” said Jackaby. “Or trying to joke. Ghastly sense of humor, that one. Best to just ignore her, I find.”

  Virgule nodded sourly, still eyeing me. He escorted us out of the circle and over to the knothole in the tree, where I retrieved my iron key and Jackaby collected what appeared to be a few tinkling coins and a wrapped butterscotch.

  “We need more help,” Jackaby mumbled, half to himself, as we reached the edge of the park.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it, sir?”

  “It isn’t good.” He sighed. “Arawn’s arrogance is going to get a lot of people killed. He thinks his defenses are unbreachable—yet someone nicked that crown out of the heart of his own castle. He thinks his army is unbeatable—but his most elite soldiers were just massacred.”

  “At least the king agreed to work with us in the end.”

  “He hasn’t agreed to work with us, he’s agreed to send us into the same trap that killed his best soldiers. His preliminary scouts couldn’t find the rend, and his Valinguard just died trying. Arawn would rather let us blunder into the same fate than admit that he’s out of his depth.”

  “So we’re not going to go looking for the rend?”

  “Of course we’re going to go looking for the rend,” said Jackaby. “And the crown, the spear, and the shield. There’s too much at stake now to start worrying about little things like being brutally murdered.”

  Chapter Five

  The Mason Street Police Station was busier than usual. The typically quiet detention hall was packed with haggard officers processing detainees. None of the uniforms even bothered with us as Jackaby pushed through the crush and made for the hallway to the rear. We wound our way through the corridors to the commissioner’s office.

  The dimly lit room was a sea of paperwork, atop which Commissioner Marlowe appeared to be keeping afloat by the sheer buoyancy of his enmity.

  “Jackaby,” he grunted as my employer rapped on his open door.

  “Marlowe.”

  “Good afternoon, Commissioner,” I said. “Please pardon our intrusion.”

  “Miss Rook. To what do I owe this”—Marlowe’s eyes flicked back to Jackaby, who had begun conspicuously leafing through a stack of confidential reports—“this visit?” He took the stack from my employer and deposited it in a cabinet behind his desk.

  “We may need to borrow a few of your boys,” said Jackaby. “There is a—what would you call it, Miss Rook?”

  “Cataclysm?” I suggested.

  “A tad dramatic. But also accurate.”

  Marlowe’s eye twitched. “Every one of my best men has worked double or triple shifts this week already. I have no intention of loaning out the few remaining hands I haven’t already exhausted. But out of morbid curiosity, how many of my officers were you hoping to borrow?”

  “Some,” answered Jackaby. “Possibly most. Probably the whole lot, actually. How quickly can you get all of them assembled so that we can have a little chat?”

  Provided proper tinder and dry kindling, Marlowe’s expression could have been used to start a fire.

  “Please, sir,” I said. “We don’t mean to make things more difficult, but I’m afraid it really is of the utmost importance that New Fiddleham be prepared for what’s to come.”

  Marlowe turned to me with weary eyes. “And what is to come, precisely?”

  I opened my mouth, but halted, trying to find a way to explain the whole affair that didn’t sound like madness.

  “Madness,” Jackaby cut in. “Chaos and war and pandemonium. Have you read the Book of Revelation? A bit of that. More monsters.”

  Marlowe pursed his lips and placed his palms very slowly on his desk while we explained about the Fair King and the Dire King, about the Annwyn and the barrier, about the rend in the veil and about the end of the world as we know it. Marlowe listened.

  When we were finished, he took a deep breath. “A year ago I’d have had you in lockup for wasting my time with an impossible report like that.”

  “A year ago, I think you did,” said Jackaby.

  “But a year ago my lockup wasn’t already full to capacity with the subjects of impossible reports.”

  Jackaby tilted his head. “Come again?”

  Marlowe nodded sourly toward the hallway. “You’re not the only one hunting monsters these days.”

  “I knew Mayor Spade was on the hunt,” Jackaby said as Marlowe opened the door to the holding cells. “But I underestimated the size of his net.”

  There were only three cells in Mason Street detention hall, two of which were now packed full of men, and the third full of women. Several more sad suspects sat waiting their turns in chairs across from the holding cells. None of them looked especially like criminals. One of the women in the far cell looked old enough to be my grandmother. She was wearing an apron still chalky white with flour. A pair of schoolboys huddled in the corner of one of the men’s cells, sniffling. A man in oil-stained overalls sat on the bench beside them, shaking his head and sighing heavily.

  “This is insane,” Jackaby said. “I know Spade and his militia have been canvassing the city, but I thought they were like the butt of a bad joke the city was telling itself. I didn’t think anybody was taking them seriously!”

  “Nobody was,” Marlowe said. “Public opinion had their whole operation chalked up to paranoia and superstition, until a couple days ago. The other shoe dropped when Spade’s guys finally caught some kind of imp yesterday morning. Looked like a naked monkey to me. They’re calling it the Inkling Devil. I’m surprised this is the first you’ve heard about it. They paraded what was left of the thing through the town on a stake. I’ve been doing managerial gymnastics trying to keep the rumors from throwing New Fiddleham into a panic, and Spade’s boys are putting on a damned puppet show with a real-life demon.”

  “They killed it?” Jackaby’s voice was even, but I could see the dark clouds rolling over his brow.

  “Spade called it a matter of public safety. He said he was raising awareness, needed to show the people the truth. A real live dead demon gave teeth to everything Spade had been saying in all of his speeches and rallies. Now neighbors are reporting neighbors and landlords are ratting out tenants. This is just the crowd we’ve processed since last night.” Marlowe waved a hand at the cells. “Spade wants every detainee thoroughly interrogated and documented. The paperwork is a nightmare. We’ll have to start shipping them up to Crowley Penitentiary soon. There just isn’t room enough in our jailhouse.”

  I surveyed the dejected lot. More than miserable, several of the detainees had suffered recent injuries—black eyes, bloody lips. A man toward the back was cradling his arm as though it might be broken, and behind him I could see a fellow whose face appeared to have been badly burned.

  A portly officer with a walrus mustache was frantically filling out reports and signing paperwork for the latest batch of remandees.

  “Mind if I have a little peek at those, Alton?” Jackaby asked as he slid the officer’s clipboard off his desk and began to flip through the most recent arrivals.

  “It’s Allan,” the man said. “Hey—I’m gonna need that back.”

  “It’s
fine,” Marlowe grunted.

  “Where is Snorri Schmitz?” Jackaby asked the room.

  Manacles clinked as Mr. Schmitz waved a hand forlornly. He was a short, round-faced man. “This doesn’t list any offense,” Jackaby declared. “It just says he was accused of being half gnome!”

  “You have to admit, he is rather on the stumpy side,” mumbled the mustachioed officer. Snorri glowered at him. “But if you say he isn’t, Mr. Jackaby—well, then I suppose you’re sort of the expert.” He looked to Marlowe to confirm this. Marlowe looked at Jackaby.

  “What? Of course he’s half gnome! That’s not the point! Show me the law that says having human parents is a requirement for citizenship!” He flipped a few pages. “Stupid. Stupid. If that one were a changeling, those irons would be burning his skin. Stupid. And how about this? You’re accusing this woman of witchcraft and devil worship? Well, which is it?”

  “Erm, both?” Allan supplied.

  “Oh, come on, Allan! You don’t have to be an expert in the occult to work out the problem there. Who’s the one person you need to believe in if you’re going to worship the devil?”

  “Er . . .” Allan’s mustache bobbled. He looked to Marlowe for help, but the commissioner only raised an eyebrow.

  “Care to take a crack at it, Miss Rook?” Jackaby turned to me.

  “The devil?” I said.

  “Right you are! If you’re going to worship Old Scratch, you’ve got to believe in him in the first place, haven’t you? Witchcraft is a belief system, Alton—”

  “Allan.”

  “—and those who practice it believe in various gods, goddesses, and spirits. Care to take a stab at who’s not on the list?”

  “The . . . devil?” Allan guessed meekly.

  “Now you’re catching up! If you are going to make a lot of idiotic accusations, you might at least try to avoid making mutually exclusive ones!”

  A door opened at the end of the hall, and two officers half dragged the sagging body of a thin man in a gray cardigan up to the door of the cell. Jackaby dropped the clipboard back on the desk and watched the procession shuffle up.

  “Detainees will move away from the door,” instructed the first officer, pulling the keys from his waist. The men inside did their best to squeeze back a few paces, and the prisoner was deposited within. His cell mates helped him limp over to the bench. His face was badly bruised, and he was bleeding from a cut just above his eye.

  “Like I said,” Marlowe grunted. “Thoroughly interrogated.”

  “What happened to that man?” demanded Jackaby.

  “Man isn’t quite the word for it,” a familiar voice cut in. Mayor Spade himself had emerged from the doorway at the end of the hall.

  The mayor wore a canary yellow waistcoat and a coffee brown bow tie. He stumbled as he stepped out, sending his spectacles sliding down his nose, and he nudged them back up. Spade might have been the least intimidating figure in the room, incarcerated grandmothers included. If one were to vandalize the portrait of a slightly stocky twelve-year-old boy by erasing his hair and scribbling in a beard, one would have produced a reasonable likeness of Mayor Philip Spade.

  “It took us some time to coax the whole of it out of him,” he continued, puffing out his chest proudly, “but we got the job done. Hello, Detective. Glad you could finally join us. I was beginning to wonder if my telegrams were going astray.”

  “I read the first few,” said Jackaby. “I’ve instructed my duck to just file the rest directly under P. I left it to him to decide if that was for politics or paranoia.”

  “No need for that,” Spade said, bristling. “Turns out we were right all along, weren’t we? You might have saved us a lot of trouble if you had lent us your assistance sooner.”

  “I don’t think you need my assistance to rough up innocent people.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. We let the people go,” Spade said.

  Jackaby did not reply.

  “Oh, come off it. Really. You and I are marching under the same banner, Detective. We’ve made a few mistakes, to be sure, but we’re correcting as we go. I am making New Fiddleham safe again.” He squared his jaw.

  Jackaby looked unimpressed. “For whom?”

  “For us!” Spade insisted. “For people!”

  “There are at least a dozen sentient species represented in this chamber—so what gives you authority to decide which ones get to be considered people?”

  “This is nothing,” said Spade, his eyes twinkling. “You should see what we’ve got locked up in the animal control office.”

  “Mayor Spade,” Jackaby began. He took a deep breath. “Philip. This is wrong.”

  The mayor frowned. “Thanks very much for your consultation, Detective. I will take that under advisement.”

  “You can’t—”

  “You only think I can’t!” Spade burst out. Beneath his beard, Spade’s cheeks flushed. His eyes narrowed and he readjusted his spectacles. “You’ve built a life out of thinking I can’t! You want a pat on the back and a nice reward every time you swat a bee for us, but all the while you’ve let the hornets build their nest in our eaves. I won’t sit around waiting for you to play hero any more, Detective. You’ve been telling me for years that there are things hiding in the shadows of my city. Well, I believe you. I have found the things in the shadows, Mr. Jackaby, and now I’m the one turning on the lights!”

  “Don’t be asinine, Spade! You romanticize fighting oddlings the same way you romanticize a holiday in Spain. You make it sound like this grand exotic adventure—right up until you’re there, complaining about the food and watching your neighbors hang their unmentionables on the line. They’re just people!”

  “Except they’re not people! We’re talking about magical creatures! Dangerous, unpredictable magical creatures, here in the real world!”

  “Magic is just magic!” Jackaby threw up his hands. “It’s not inherently special or strange or dangerous! It’s everywhere! It’s already all around you! If just being magical meant that something was dangerous, you’d have long since been killed by a butterfly, or a bubble, or an apple turnover.”

  “Those things aren’t magical.”

  “Of course they’re magical! Argh! You infuriating man! If a unicorn came and sat in the corner of your office every day, then by the end of the year you’d be hanging your coat on its horn. There is magic in your life! Not appreciating it does not make it any less magical. Yes, some of that magic is dangerous, but so are scissors and electricity and politics—and plenty of other completely human inventions!”

  Spade’s voice grew quiet, which somehow had the effect of magnifying his intensity. “Don’t presume to lecture me, Detective. Redcaps. Werewolves. Dragons. I know very well that there are monsters in New Fiddleham. My wife was one of them. How many people did you let that nixie murder before you captured her?”

  Jackaby considered this soberly for a moment. “Fight the monsters, then, Philip. Don’t fight the innocent bystanders who happen to come from the same place. You’re not afraid of magic, not really. You’re just afraid of what you don’t understand—and too stubborn to try understanding.”

  “I understand more and more, Detective,” Spade hissed. “I know very well what I’m fighting.”

  “Do you really? Because based on this detainment facility, you appear to be winning the battle against bakers and mathematics teachers. What exactly do you think you’re fighting? Biscuits and geometry?”

  “What I’m fighting,” hissed Spade, “is a war!”

  The detention hall had gone eerily silent. Jackaby shook his head. “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “This is war, Mr. Jackaby—make no mistake—and you find yourself dangerously close to the wrong side of it.” Spade’s voice had taken on a cold edge. “If you care at all about humanity, then stand with me.”

  Jackaby turned
his gaze to the crowded cells, and then back to the mayor, his eyes rimmed more with regret than rage. “It is for the sake of our humanity that I stand against you.”

  Spade and Jackaby stood facing each other in tense silence for several seconds. At length, the mayor straightened his waistcoat and fixed Jackaby with his steeliest glare. “I’ll be watching you very closely, Detective.”

  “I do hope so, Mayor.” Jackaby nodded politely and spun on his heel. “You might actually learn something if you do.”

  Chapter Six

  Jackaby did not speak as we left the building. We were three or four blocks away from the station house when Lydia Lee caught up to us, the coach rattling and clinking and the dappled gray horse stamping its hooves impatiently on the cobblestones. Miss Lee managed to convince the Duke to clop to a halt just ahead of us, and my employer climbed into the carriage wordlessly.

  Miss Lee gave me an inquisitive look, but Jackaby finally broke his silence before I could explain. “Don’t bother with niceties. Take me home, Miss Lee.” He thought for a moment. “I’m going to need you to go to jail for me afterward.”

  “That is the second time a man’s said those words to me,” she replied gamely. “Although the last time I got flowers and a dance first, if memory serves.”

  “Bail,” amended Jackaby as Miss Lee hopped back into the driver’s box.

  “They usually do, in the end,” she said, sighing.

  “What? Listen, I have a jar of banknotes in my office earmarked for bail. I’ll bring it out to you as soon as we arrive. I need you to bring it to the processing officer at the Mason Street Station. He’ll sort out the paperwork. Just sign where he tells you to. Ask for Alton.”

  “Allan,” I corrected.

  “I’m fairly sure it’s Alton,” said Jackaby.

  “You want me to post bail for somebody?” Miss Lee called down as the carriage began to rattle on down the street. “I guess I can do that.”

  “Thank you,” Jackaby called back to her.