The Dire King

by William Ritter

  “Where is that friendly father of yours? Off giving schoolchildren nightmares?”

  “He is coming,” said Morwen with a menacing smile. “He is setting in motion the next stage of his plan.”

  “And what might that be?” I asked. I was slowly moving toward Serif’s sword. Morwen did not appear to have noticed.

  “The final one,” she said with sinister delight. “He will be very pleased you came to see it done.”

  “Will he be pleased about this?” I said. I whipped Serif’s sword out of its sheath and swiped it at the pipe climbing up the wall beside me. It chimed like a church bell. My wrist throbbed with the vibration. The pipe was barely chipped.

  “About your ineptitude?” she asked. “He might be a little amused.”

  Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs behind me, and I turned to see a man with enormous muttonchop sideburns and wild eyes climbing up the second-floor landing. He reached the top and snarled. His teeth looked very sharp.

  “Your assistance is not required, Mr. Loup,” Morwen said lazily. The hairy man did not approach, but he did remain locked in place, effectively blocking any chance we might have had at making our exit down the stairs.

  “Oh, come on!” I kicked at the pipe. It shifted and began to hiss from a seam a few feet up. I might not be able to take apart the whole building, but I would do as much damage as I could before she got to me. I kicked again, and a fine mist began to spray over us.

  “Please, no,” Morwen said in mock concern. “Don’t ruin the cooling lines.”

  “Miss Rook, I think perhaps it would be unwise—” Jackaby began, but I drove one more kick into the pipe, and the metal split, a stream of water gushing out at once.

  The fountain cascading over our heads did not splash down across the landing. It arced through the air and then defied physics to spin around us instead. It was a ribbon of whirling liquid, and then a wide band, growing thicker as more water fed it from the ruptured line. Mr. Loup chuckled thickly from the stairs. My eyes shot up. Morwen was spinning a hand lazily in the air as though stirring a pot with her fingers. I cursed inwardly. Nixie. Water spirit. I was an idiot.

  “You know, I do enjoy a good evisceration, but it’s been months since I properly drowned anyone,” Morwen mused. The water was quickly spreading into a thick dome. Soon it would be enough to encapsulate us in a complete globe of water. With all of those muscular monsters waiting right outside the door, I had not expected to be killed by a bubble.

  “The window,” Jackaby whispered. He nodded toward the rend, where, through the distortion of the gurgling wall of water, I could still make out the rip into our world. The hole torn through the fabric of the veil had ceased growing any larger, but the image of Mary all dressed in blue hung before us, dancing and bobbing on the far side of the wave. “We can make it if we move fast.”

  “What?” I whispered back. “Even if we could, the machine is still on.”

  “Three,” said Jackaby.

  “Wait, we can’t—”

  “Two.”

  “Sir!”

  “One!” Jackaby grabbed me by the hand and leapt. I felt my body slow down as we crashed through the water. For a horrifying second I was afraid that I wouldn’t have the momentum to escape its clutches, but then I was tumbling out the other side and Jackaby was pulling me to my feet. Soaking wet, we reached the edge of the demolished landing and jumped.

  We leapt over the humming generators, through the glowing golden light, and into another world entirely.

  Gravity shifted abruptly. Down became left and up became right and then the Blessed Virgin was shattering into a million tiny pieces all around me and rows of pews were rushing toward me. I ricocheted into the first bench hard enough to send it tumbling into the second, skidded along the floor, and came to rest in an aisle. My head spun. From the sound of it, Jackaby’s landing had been no smoother than mine.

  I took a silent inventory of my injuries, wiggling my legs and arms and gingerly turning my neck this way and that before I sat up. We were in the church.

  “So much for subterfuge,” said Jackaby, climbing out from under an overturned lectern at the front of the chamber. “Are you all right?”

  “I have felt better,” I said, “but stiff upper lip and all that.” I winced. “And stiff everything else while we’re at it. I may have bruised parts of myself I didn’t know I had.”

  I surveyed the room. It was a chapel like any other, with a large wooden cross on the wall above the dais, where Jackaby was now sitting up, and more stained glass windows around the room letting in colorful rays of filtered sunlight.

  I looked back at the one through which we had made our explosive entrance. The dark tower was visible, its details hazy behind the bright green glow. I expected to see Morwen leaping after us at any moment, but the scene beyond the veil remained empty. Where was she?

  Jackaby appeared to be having the same thought. “I doubt she wants to risk having her power siphoned if she comes through,” he reasoned.

  “Right,” I said. “Why didn’t that thing drain us the way it drained Serif?” I asked.

  “It did,” Jackaby grunted. He limped off the podium, moving toward the back of the church. “We’re human, though, not beings of magic, so the effects were not as pronounced. It was definitely pulling at our vital energies, though. If we had hung about, it would have finished the job soon enough.”

  “Now that you mention it, I could use a sustaining cup of tea. Although that might come of being broadsided by a church,” I said. “And cut by a vampire, and bullied by ogres.”

  “We also skipped breakfast,” Jackaby added. “It’s probably the breakfast.”

  The glow coming from the rend above us dimmed, and the gap began to seal over. I blinked as the sunlight from the earthly world crept through in its place. “She’s shifted the device,” Jackaby said. “The gap is mending itself again. The next one could be anywhere. Keep alert. We need to get out of here and back to the hold at once.”

  “Of course. We wouldn’t want to leave Morwen waiting.”

  There was a flutter of movement from the shattered window above us. The gap was nearly closed when a streak of blue shot through it and came to land with a splash in the aisle next to me. I stumbled backward. The rend closed and unfiltered sunlight sparkled off the glistening figure rising in front of us. Morwen had ridden the burst of water into the church.

  “I don’t think she’s the waiting type,” said Jackaby.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Morwen took a deep breath, water curling up around her legs like a coiling liquid snake. There was nothing between us now but empty air. The church held its breath.

  And then Morwen collapsed.

  The nixie dropped to her knees. Her water whip fell, splattering into a damp smear across the floorboards.

  “She must have drained her magic crossing the barrier!” I said.

  “No,” said Jackaby. “She turned the machine away from the gap so that she could make the jump. This is something else.”

  Morwen shuddered.

  “It’s the church,” Jackaby said. “The last time you met, she couldn’t touch you when your scars formed the likeness of a cross on your cheek—now she’s got apostles shining down at her from every window and that great big symbol hanging over her.” He gestured up to the massive cross on the wall above the lectern.

  Morwen was straining to rise, but her eyes screwed shut and she fell again.

  “Luck is on our side for once,” Jackaby added. “That’s novel.”

  “Oh dear,” I said. “I have a feeling it’s not going to last.”

  “What?” He followed my eyes. Emerald light was playing across the surface of the enormous cross. A new rend was forming right on top of it.

  “If the veil opens there, it’s going to split the cross in two,” I said. “If
the sign of the cross is what’s holding Morwen in place, I sincerely doubt it will be very effective in pieces.”

  “We need to get up there the moment it does,” Jackaby declared. “That rend is our path back to the Annwyn.”

  Together we upturned the nearest pew. The bench was heavy and ungainly, but we managed to lean it up against the wall with its back side up, like a ramp. A tiny hole had formed in the center of the cross, and it was growing.

  “It’s opening,” said Jackaby. He glanced back at Morwen Finstern, who was clenching her fists as if straining against an invisible weight. “Get up there.”

  I held my skirts and took the ramp at a run. I was nearly to the top when the base slid out and the pew dropped several inches. My feet skidded out from under me and I slammed hard against the wood, hugging it to keep from falling. Jackaby threw his body weight against the bottom of the bench to stop it from sliding.

  I turned my eyes back to the cross just in time to see the rend rip through the wood completely. The bottom fell away, sending a wooden plank with one splintered end clattering to the floor below. The top of the cross swung apart as well, one arm swaying to the right and an L-shaped section dangling loosely to the left.

  “Go!” Jackaby yelled. I heard the sound of Morwen’s blade sliding free of its sheath, but I did not turn to look before I jumped back into the Annwyn.

  I was met on the other side not by the dimly lit interior of the keep, but by intense sunlight and a startlingly long drop. The tower was four stories tall, and I had just slipped out at the top of it. From this dizzying height, I had an excellent view of the hundreds of monsters assembled in the courtyard thirty or forty feet below me. I yelped in alarm and clutched frantically at the wall, my hand unexpectedly finding purchase around a narrow copper pipe. I clung to it with both hands, feeling the metal sway.

  I began to hear the shouts from below. The gruesome garrison had spotted me. I tried not to focus on the noise. My hands were shaking, and sweat trickled down my temple. It came as very little consolation that the fall would kill me before those brutes down below ever got the chance.

  Jackaby burst out of the rend beside me, and I instinctively shot out an arm and grabbed him by his ragged, flapping coat. He clutched at my arm with one hand and at his ridiculous hat with the other.

  “Pipe!” I managed, with remarkable articulation, given the circumstances. “Grab it!”

  He slammed into the wall beneath me and my hand flew back to the pipe, which squeaked and leaned about six inches farther from the wall. I felt dizzy.

  “This is not a measurable improvement from the church,” said Jackaby.

  The building rumbled and shook. I felt my grip slipping.

  And then Morwen flew through the gap. She locked eyes on me for a fleeting second and swung the black blade hard toward me. The obsidian edge sparked against the stones and spun out of her hands, and then her eyes widened.

  Morwen Finstern fell.

  I closed my eyes, my breath coming in gasps and gulps. Below us, the crowd began to circle around the nixie’s still body. A hundred eyes climbed the tower up toward us on our precarious perch.

  “Back to the church,” grunted Jackaby. “Sooner would be better.”

  The church was dark and cool and quiet as I hopped down from the upturned pew. My legs were about to give out. My hands were throbbing. My chest was on fire. I collapsed onto the nearest bench.

  Jackaby popped back through behind me and scooted down the pew to join me. For a long time he said nothing. We just sat there, breathing.

  “She was holding back.” Jackaby finally broke the silence.

  “That was holding back?” I panted.

  “Less so with you,” he amended. “I don’t think she likes you very much.”

  “I did put onions in her pie.”

  “She was holding back against me. She had a clean shot there, in the end, but she let me climb through after you before she took it.”

  “Why would she be holding back?”

  “Pavel said he wasn’t allowed to kill me. He said they needed me. Needed my eyes.”

  “Well, let’s try to keep those in your head, shall we?”

  I leaned back against the bench. The church was spinning slightly around me. I felt another shudder, like a faint earthquake.

  “The whole fabric of the veil is strained in this church,” Jackaby said. “The coherence charm is the only thing holding Hafgan’s keep together. I don’t imagine this parish can boast the same.”

  We sat there, gazing up at the stained glass apostles, catching our breath. It felt very much like we were sitting in the eye of a storm.

  “Hm,” I said. “That’s funny.”

  “What’s funny?”

  “The apostles.”

  “Typically known for having been chummy with the Messiah and then dying torturous martyr’s deaths,” said Jackaby. “Hilarious.”

  “Not that sort of funny. There are only eleven of them here,” I said.

  “Well, we did make a rather dramatic entrance through the twelfth,” said Jackaby.

  “No, we came in via the Virgin Mary,” I said.

  “Oh. Perhaps they left Judas out,” he said. “Traitor and all that.”

  “No, he’s there, on the end,” I said. Indeed, the duplicitous disciple was looking rather ashamed of himself, a stream of silver coins pouring from the pouch in his left hand. “And there’s John with the chalice and snake. Matthew the tax collector. That one’s Peter, there. Which one is missing?”

  “Not really our chief concern, just at the moment.” Jackaby sighed. He pushed himself up from the pew. “What we need to do now is find our way back to the sub-basement and through the original rend that Pavel showed us. That new one won’t do us much good, unless you’ve sprouted wings.” He paused. “Which, come to think of it, is exactly what Douglas did on the day that he visited this church.”

  I continued gazing up at the windows. Something was off about them, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I tried hard to remember my Sunday school lessons with old Vicar Peebles.

  “That one must be Jude,” I said to myself. Jackaby had already gone to poke his head into the rectory at the far end of the church. “And there’s James the Elder and James the Younger. Andrew. Bartholomew. That has to be Thomas with the spears, and Philip with the basket. Who’s missing? Paul?”

  “Paul was never one of the twelve,” Jackaby called, sweeping out of the back room again. “Aren’t there any stairs in this silly church? We may need to chisel our way right through the floor. How they managed to pierce through in the first place and make a hole of that size without raising all sorts of attention is—” Jackaby stopped. He slapped himself in the face.

  “Sir?”

  “I’m an idiot,” he said. “Of course they raised attention. They raised mine! They cleaved their way through a dimensional barrier—they produced a discharge of tremendous magical force. It would have left its mark.”

  “Like burn marks after a fire?” I said.

  “Precisely. Except magic tends to have a more dramatic effect than flame. Untempered magic blasting out from a dimension full of ethereal energies into a veritable vacuum of the supernatural would wreak havoc on the earthly realm. Oh, I am an absolute dullard! I didn’t just miss the scorch marks—I was there for the explosion itself! The day the council broke through, I was here! Douglas received the blast full force. I watched it happen, I just didn’t know what it was! It’s the reason he’s a duck! I have been living with one of the scorch marks for the past three years, feeding him bread crumbs and paying him quarterly to keep my tax receipts in order!” He pulled off his hat and ran his hand through his tangled hair. “I thought that had been the end of a caper—it was just the start!”

  The church shook with another tremor.

  “Why this church?” he said, st
uffing the floppy cap back on his head. “Why Father Grafton? How was he all mixed up in all this?”

  A thought occurred to me. “Grafton knew about the shield because he had the shield,” I said. “He must have had it for years. Maybe centuries. The twain said the shield was created to protect Hafgan against anything, even old age.”

  Jackaby nodded. “That would explain why I couldn’t see a curse or a jinx on Grafton. He hadn’t been attacked when we saw him; he had just stopped being protected. He had left the shield behind. We were watching countless years catch up with him all at once.”

  Another rumbling shudder shook the church. Dust trickled from the ceiling, and the lighting changed. I glanced around to find the source.

  “But why leave it behind?” Jackaby continued. “Why give it up? If Grafton was invulnerable, what would make him afraid enough to abandon his protection?”

  There was another window. I blinked. There, on our right, a twelfth apostle had appeared. The other windows hadn’t moved, their spacing hadn’t changed—the missing apostle was simply suddenly among them.

  “And if he did leave it behind,” Jackaby rambled on, completely unaware of the window’s appearance, “then where is it now?”

  “Simon,” I said, snapping my fingers. The window depicted a man with slightly wild eyes, a large saw leaning to one side of him. In his hands was clasped a book, presumably the Bible. Inlaid on the cover was the symbol of a ruby red fish. Vicar Peebles’ voice echoed in my memory. “He was called Simon the—”

  “He said it’s in the Bible of the—” Jackaby began at the same time.

  “—Zealot,” we finished together.

  I looked at Jackaby. Jackaby looked at me. We both looked at Simon.

  “Oh,” said Jackaby. “That window definitely wasn’t there the last time.”

  “Something fishy about that fish?” I said.

  “The quakes must have shaken loose a dimensional wrinkle.” Jackaby’s eyes were locked on the glass. The fish’s tail and fins were of a slightly lighter shade of red glass than the body. “He hid the gem in broad daylight where none of us could find it,” Jackaby marveled. “It was tucked halfway into the Annwyn. That meant even I couldn’t see it. Human beings couldn’t just stumble on it, and the Dire Council couldn’t just march through a church looking for it.”