The Dire King

by William Ritter

  Emerald light rippled across the spire above her and Virgule flipped out of the rend and spun to land in a crouch beside his general. The captain’s entrance was far more graceful than mine had been. Virgule stood, his hand flying to the hilt of his own sword.

  “Everyone seems to think so, but the twain didn’t seem particularly malevolent,” I said.

  “They never do,” Serif snarled. She lowered the crossbow.

  I scowled. “What was Hafgan’s original purpose?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” said Serif.

  “The twain said that Hafgan was victorious. But Arawn told us that Hafgan wanted to destroy the barrier. He didn’t. The veil still stands—for now, at least—so how was Hafgan victorious?”

  “He wasn’t. Hafgan failed. The twain lied to you.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Jackaby. “The twain wasn’t lying. Or at least he believed what he was saying.”

  “Am I lying?” Serif asked.

  Jackaby considered her. “Hm. No.”

  “There you have it.”

  “How did you two get here?” I asked. “If Arawn doesn’t know about the Dire King’s stronghold, then how did you two find it?”

  “We followed you, obviously,” said Serif. “We lost your trail briefly in the sewers, but Virgule connected the dots.”

  “Ley lines,” Virgule said. “I knew we were close, so I plotted the nearest corresponding ley lines and found an intersection point very nearby.”

  “Ley lines?” I asked.

  “Seams,” said Jackaby. “A ley line is a seam along the veil wall. Our world has scarcely any functional magic compared to the Annwyn, but magic is always strongest along the seams. Sorcerers and witches throughout the ages have made use of these ley lines to strengthen their own natural gifts. It stands to reason the rend would fall on a ley line. Easier to pop a seam than to cut straight through.”

  “Care to explain why you were working with the enemy?” Serif asked. Her grip tightened on the crossbow, but for now she kept it hanging at her side.

  “Better the devil you know,” Jackaby answered. He nodded toward Pavel. “He got us closer to the devil we don’t.”

  “It seems he outlived his usefulness.” Serif raised an eyebrow. “Are you in the habit of killing all your informants?”

  “Only those who are in the habit of trying to kill us,” Jackaby said.

  “Madam General,” Virgule interrupted. “We’re not alone.”

  The doors to a blocky guardhouse on the far corner of the hold flung open. In the doorway stood a lithe man with white-blond hair, his face shrouded in shadow. He was oddly familiar, but my attention was pulled from him to a pair of bright red imps who exploded past him, tails whipping behind them eagerly. They leapt onto the outer rim of the wall, vaulting the crenellations and chattering like monkeys as they galloped toward us.

  Virgule’s sword was out in a flash as he leapt down from the roof onto the wall. “Watch out, General.”

  Serif was unfazed. She stood her ground and leveled her crossbow at the nearest galloping imp. The bolt impaled the thing in midleap, sending the little red creature backward over the parapet with a pained squeak and then tumbling down the side of the wall. The second imp chittered angrily and continued forward in leaps and bounds. “If imps are the best they can throw at us—” Serif began.

  She was interrupted by a wet groan. The ogres—the ones Pavel had dispatched for us—sat up. They pushed themselves heavily to their feet, their heads still hanging at an unnatural angle to their bodies. Their eyes were glassy like the late Mr. Fairmont’s had been, right before the late Mr. Fairmont tried to eat Charlie and me back in the gardens.

  If you are unfamiliar with the sensation of being surrounded by undead ogres, it is akin to the feeling of being lost in the woods. The shapes looming around you are simply too much to take in all at once. The difference, of course, is that trees are less inclined to murder you violently. Also, there is a smell.

  The ogre corpses had reached their full height, their necks cracking sickeningly as they looked around to face us. My head barely came up to the largest brute’s waist, my eyes roughly even with its meaty, swaying knuckles. I felt slightly dizzy as I gazed up.

  Charlie and I had only barely survived one walking human corpse; I did not like our odds against this massive pair. Perhaps if Pavel had still been alive to help—and if he had not been actively trying to kill us himself—we might have stood half a chance. He had, after all, been strong enough to take on the two brutes by himself. But now—

  Pavel sat up. The early morning sunlight washed his pale, scarred face. It was the first time I had ever seen him upright in the daylight. He did not look better for it. His eyes, like the ogres’, were eerily vacant. The creature that had once been Pavel stood up clumsily.

  “Lieutenant,” barked Serif. “I’ve got the larger ogre; you see to the lesser. Go. Seer—can I trust you two to attend to your reanimated informant?”

  “We’ve got it in hand!” Jackaby said.

  Virgule had already advanced on the first ogre, sword drawn. The brute took a swipe at him, which he ducked easily, rising to bury the blade in the ogre’s chest. The sword sank deep. The ogre glanced at the hilt protruding from his torso and then slapped Virgule with a blow that sent him skidding along the castle wall until he rolled to a stop twenty feet away.

  Serif grunted as she launched herself against the other ogre, but my attention was quickly drawn to Pavel, who was advancing fast.

  Jackaby gripped the wooden stake. “No hard feelings?” he said, and drove it into Pavel’s heart. The forces driving Pavel had clearly changed. The stake sank into his chest, but to no avail. Pavel did not slow, but rather pushed into the attack, catching Jackaby by surprise.

  Fortunately for my employer, Pavel appeared to have forgotten that he had no teeth. He buried his gums into Jackaby’s neck. Jackaby cried out in alarm. The two of them were locked together, looking equally distraught for several seconds, until Jackaby came to his senses. He seized Pavel by the arm and flipped him around in an awkward tumble that sent both of them sprawling.

  “Sir, look out!” I called. The remaining imp, still bounding along the parapets, was only a few leaps away. Jackaby looked about and grabbed his fallen satchel, which still lay atop the wall where Jenny had dropped it. He threw the entire thing haphazardly toward the imp.

  He missed by a considerable margin. The sack flopped open on the ground about halfway between them. The beet red creature touched down one last time before he made his final pounce. Except, instead of solid stone, the imp encountered the inside of Jackaby’s enchanted satchel. The thing about Jackaby’s satchel was that there was considerably more of it inside than there was outside. The imp squawked in surprise and vanished from sight. Jackaby threw himself over the satchel and held it closed with his full weight.

  Panting, he shot me a celebratory grin. “I’ve got this one,” he said, then his eyes widened. “Watch yourself!”

  I turned in time to see Serif’s ogre, the larger of the two, stumble backward, nearly on top of me, as it recoiled from a blow. The brutes were slow and uncoordinated, but what they lacked in dexterity they more than made up for in sheer muscle. Crossbow bolts stuck out of this one like porcupine quills. The general had abandoned her bow in favor of her sword.

  Virgule still had not managed to retrieve his own weapon from the chest of the other ogre. It lumbered after him like a grunting, angry kebab. Virgule wove around its strikes, but he was moving stiffly, and the living dead showed no signs of slowing.

  On the ground ahead of me I caught sight of one of the discarded poleaxes. I grabbed the pole—and nearly fell over. The weapon was stuck fast, jammed in place between the outer parapet and the inner wall. I abandoned it and snatched up the other, only a few feet away. The weapon was much too heavy for me to wield with fines
se, but I hefted it with both hands anyway.

  I glanced over my shoulder in time to see the largest ogre thundering furiously toward me, Serif on its shoulders, dodging its hands as it swatted at her. She raised her blade and swung down, landing a blow across the ogre’s neck, but she had sacrificed her own defenses for the shot, and the ogre’s thick hide was unforgiving. The blade cut a sickly cleft in the corpse’s flesh that did not bleed so much as it leaked a dark, syrupy liquid. In return, the brute locked its teeth into her and tore a ragged bite out of her right shoulder. Serif’s sword clanged to the stones, and her legs buckled as the ogre dropped her.

  Serif defenseless beneath him, the brute went for the kill, and my hands acted on their own. Before I realized what I was doing, I had swung the poleax. I struck the ogre off-center, lopping off the wretched creature’s ear and a goodly portion of its cheek.

  My stomach lurched. I was going to be sick.

  The creature turned slowly to face me. Well, it turned to three-fourths-of-a-face me. Don’t be sick. Don’t be sick. Don’t be sick until you’re done fighting monsters.

  The ogre lunged, and I pelted toward the guardhouse in the opposite direction, slipping past Virgule and his own hulking opponent. I could hear my ogre slam into Virgule’s as we passed, and I hazarded a glance over my shoulder. Virgule’s impaled creature had abandoned its efforts to catch Virgule and was loping along behind us, glaring, instead. Splendid. Because what I needed was to have both brutes after me. Clumsy or not, they did not look inclined to stop anytime soon, and the heavy poleax in my hands felt more like an anchor than an asset.

  An idea danced in my brain. I willed my legs to pump just a little faster, to put just a little more distance between the ogres and myself.

  I could feel the thuds of both brutes now loping behind me along the wall. They were slow, but for every three of my strides they needed only one. When I was nearly to the guardhouse, I dropped to the ground and rammed the pointed tip of the poleax into the outer parapet and shoved the butt against the inner. I gave it a firm kick to wedge it between the two crenellated walls as tightly as I could. It stuck soundly, but I wasn’t certain it would be strong enough. No time for certainty. I leapt back to my feet. Please work. Please work. Please work.

  The first behemoth closed the gap, its disfigured face glistening and its lips snarling. I held my ground. Three more steps. Two. One. I dove aside, whipping around to watch the enormous ogre trip and tumble into the bricks. Its ankle smashed the pole into scraps. But it did not trip. It did not even stumble.

  The brute paused. It craned its broken neck down to look at the remains of my useless trap. At that moment, Virgule’s ogre, still barreling along behind the first, plowed straight into it from behind. The second ogre’s momentum was enough to drive the first headlong into the stone wall of the guardhouse. The masonry was sturdy but no match for a battering ram made of ogres.

  Virgule, who had been following close behind, came to a skidding halt as the guardhouse crumpled. Massive stones the size of writing desks collapsed inward, hammering the ogre with one blow after another until the colossus was buried from the shoulders up. The smaller of the two, the point of Virgule’s sword still poking out of its back, was half-buried for a moment as well, but as bad luck would have it, its head remained fully intact. It shrugged off a few cracked roofing tiles and pulled itself free.

  “I’ll call that a qualified success,” I breathed.

  “Watch out!” Virgule cried, and in another moment we both were off again, racing back along the wall.

  Ahead of us, Pavel had resumed his assault on Jackaby, who remained on the ground, clutching the jostling satchel. With one hand, Jackaby was frantically searching his pockets, pitching whatever defenses he could find at the glassy-eyed attacker.

  Jackaby swiveled his head in time to see us racing past him. “Here!” He had pulled something from his coat—it looked like a little medicine tablet—and he threw it haphazardly at the ogre’s face. It caught the brute in the mouth and at once the ogre’s jawline popped and shifted. Its teeth grew four sizes. They had been large to begin with, but at least they had been proportionately large. Now they jutted past its gray lips like enormous razor-sharp tusks. I ducked away as the ogre came at me with its new, horrifying jaws.

  With one meaty hand, the undead thug grabbed me by the waist, pinning my right arm to my side. Its skin was cool and moist, like rising dough, and it smelled of wet rats and carrion birds. I struggled with my free hand and managed to pull the useless sharpened stake out of my pocket. I might not be able to take the thing’s head off, but I would die fighting. I waited for the colossal corpse to raise its fist, but instead it did something far worse—it opened its mouth. Rancid breath washed over me, like rotten onions and spoiled death.

  I did the only thing I could think to do before the brute could take a bite of me. I stuck my hand right in between those terrible teeth and stuffed the wooden stake into the creature’s maw, wedging it between the roof of its mouth and its lower jaw. The thing halted, shaking its head. I could see the muscles of its jaw working. Pain did not appear to be an obstacle. With a final grunt of effort, it closed its great ugly mouth with a loud clack of gnashing teeth and a muffled crunch of something else inside its skull. The ogre’s eyes widened. Its muscles went limp.

  As the corpse swayed, I slipped through its grip. It managed to stagger a step or two backward before it stumbled over the edge and plummeted half a dozen stories to the ground below. The wall shook as the ogre landed. I breathed. That was both of them—we had done it!

  Serif groaned, and Virgule hastened to her side.

  “Don’t trouble yourself on my account!” grunted Jackaby. I spun around. Pavel had him pinned to the ground. Jackaby was still clutching the satchel with one hand while the other held Pavel at arm’s length. It was not really Pavel—it was a clumsy marionette of the treacherous vampire, but it was vicious all the same. The satchel flopped and bucked under Jackaby’s grasp. The vampire clawed mercilessly at his arms and chest, and the detective’s coat was in tatters.

  Virgule was attending to Serif. Beside them lay her sword. I picked it up. It was heavier than it looked, but nothing compared to the poleax. The weight balanced comfortably in my hand. While Pavel tore at my employer, I raised the blade over my head. I swung my arms and felt the sword squish and click against bone. Cutting a person’s head off is not like carving a slice of ham. There are tendons and vertebrae and . . . and . . . feelings. Feelings are awful. I was not the sort of lady who had been brought up to hack into the undead with a longsword.

  Pavel’s head turned ever so slightly, and I caught the faintest hint of that insufferable smirk he had been so good at before his un-re-dead-birth. His hollow eyes on me, Pavel caught Jackaby’s wrist in one hand. Jackaby struggled, and I could tell the corpse had a grip like steel. He was now pinned. Jackaby had to either release his hold on the imp or leave himself defenseless against the vampire.

  I hacked into Pavel with the longsword again. And a third time. And a fourth. I could feel his spine chipping with each blow. His head tilted rakishly forward. And then he caught the blade with one hand on the fifth. We all froze there for a moment, Pavel’s left hand wrapped around the sword. It began to drip something thick and syrupy. His right hand was still locked on Jackaby’s arm, and his head was lolling forward.

  “Catch,” Jackaby said, and opened the bag.

  The imp catapulted out of the bag, and the effect was something like firing an angry red cannonball directly at Pavel’s face. There was a crack.

  We never did find the head.

  The imp, having skidded and rolled to an ungainly landing halfway across the rooftop, went scampering away across the tiles.

  “Should we stop him?” Virgule asked.

  “Don’t bother,” Serif grunted. “He won’t raise any alarms that throwing an ogre over the wall didn’t already raise
.”

  “You need to stay still,” Jackaby cautioned as Serif attempted to push herself upright.

  “I need to do precisely the opposite,” snarled Serif. “Salamander gauze, Captain.”

  Virgule nodded. He produced a slim medical pouch from within his robes and took from it a roll of red-brown bandages. Serif gingerly slid the cloak from her shoulders. Her tunic beneath was saturated with blood.

  Virgule bit his lip. “This is going to—”

  “Do it now.”

  The captain swallowed and wrapped Serif’s shoulder with the cloth. As he tied off the end, the fabric began to glow like a hot ember. The noise that Serif made was not a scream in the traditional sense, but something more animal, a roar of concentrated pain and fury. When the magic had run its course, Serif gasped and pitched forward, resting her head on the stones while she caught her breath, steam billowing from the bandages.

  “Get her back to your castle,” Jackaby said. “Tell Arawn to march on Hafgan’s Hold immediately.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Serif panted.

  “The detective is right.” Virgule swallowed. “We need reinforcements.”

  “Of course we do,” Serif said. “Go, Captain, and tell Lord Arawn we need the elves and the dwarves and anyone else who will answer the call. They might not march for the Fair King, but they will march for the good of the Annwyn.”

  “You’re staying here?”

  “I do as Lord Arawn bids me. And you will do as your commander bids you. Now, go.”

  As Virgule leapt up onto the rooftop and climbed the spire back up into the rend, Jackaby pushed himself up. He tore off a particularly flappy bit of his tattered coat and sighed. One of the front pockets had been ripped halfway off, and a knot of yarn was protruding. Jackaby pulled it out. Hatun’s hat. He regarded it with a somber look in his eyes and then stuffed it on his head. He looked as ridiculous as he had the day we met. “Somebody’s got to keep the world in one piece until help arrives,” he said, “and it looks like we’re it.”