The Watchers Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by William Meikle

  “A conjurer’s trick will not save you,” the Other said.

  “Oh, it is no trick. Come to me and I’ll show you.” At first Sean sent out his compulsion, and the Boy-King actually turned, and began to move away from his bodyguard.

  Sean smiled grimly, as he felt the panic that gripped the Other. The Boy-King strained against the leash that was slowly drawing him in, and pressure grew inside Sean’s mind. But he managed to get the Other to move ten yards towards him before the strain got too much.

  “I’m coming for you,” Sean sent, imaging the loudest cry he could muster.

  Just before the link between them was broken he saw the Other stagger and fall, and felt the fear that had suddenly lodged in the Boy-King’s dark heart.

  Martin and Fitz were ready to start pumping the bellows. From out of the moor Others started to appear…rank after rank of them, coming forward. Not with any sense of military discipline, but each with its own ravening hunger driving it on.

  Fitz made to pump the bellows, but Martin stopped him.

  “They’re not in range yet.”

  “Yes, they are,” a voice said. Martin turned to see Edward Hillman signaling to a man standing beside the water wheel. Martin heard the plunger scrape against the side of the barrel, and then there was suddenly an arc of water stretching out over the moor. Others in a thirty-yard swathe started burning immediately, their flesh boiling off them in waxy lesions. They fell where they stood. More of them, panicked by the burning, ran back into the spray, and they too started to fall in their droves.

  Almost before it had started, the Others fell back into the darkness, leaving their fallen brethren to burn and decay on the sodden mud. Edward Hillman leapt around behind the ranks of troopers, almost unable to contain his joy.

  “Edward,” Martin said. “Don’t bother ever explaining anything to me. Just build it.”

  The water wheel was still turning, and the water still arced out above them.

  “Better turn it off,” Martin said. “We don’t want to use up all the garlic and silver.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Hillman said. “We turned the valve off. That’s just water…but the Other’s don’t know that.”

  Martin saw that Hillman was right…the water was spraying out over a huge swathe of moorland, and the Others had pulled away from it. Now they merely stood there, staring at the troopers in naked hunger, but unwilling to move any closer. “We had better watch our positions, Fitz,” Martin said. “Hillman is not only smart, he’s also developing cunning.”

  “More than cunning,” Hillman said, and signaled once more to the man at the wheel. Martin saw the man pull two levers, and the height of the arc of water immediately doubled.

  The Others fell and burned in their hundreds. Two minutes later the moor was once more empty. The pipes and drums had stopped, and there was only the thwup-thwup of the water pump.

  An area of land almost a hundred yards square lay sodden yet burning. Of the bodies of the Others who had fallen there was no trace, just a gray bubbling mass of twice-dead tissue.

  “Now we can turn it off,” Hillman said.

  Sean was still moving east, but a niggling doubt had settled in his mind. The red haze still hung before him, but now there was a new sound among the new music he heard, a dissonance off to the north.

  He turned slightly in that direction. Although night had fallen he could see everything sharp and clear, as if the sun still shone in the sky. He was ascending a slight slope, that when he looked north he was looking down across a stunted wood. Far beyond the wood a thin strip of silver glistened as an estuary showed up in the moonlight. And over the estuary hung another red haze…smaller than the one that marked the Boy-King’s position, but pulsing, and growing with each pulse.

  The wrongness was there as well, and Sean sent it out a thought, seeking to find a cause, but all he could discern was a formless hunger, and a desire to rip and tear. He felt suddenly warm, cocooned in deep red velvet that held a slow burn. It was seductive, and Sean felt drawn down deeper, to a black core where something lay, waiting to be born…his thought had taken him to the Boy-King’s child!

  Even as he pulled away from the connection, even as he changed direction and started to move north, he heard the last thought of the child ringing in his ears.

  Father. I am coming soon.

  Martin stood for long minutes and watched the smoke rise from the smoldering morass of the moor.

  “What do you think Fitz…five hundred?”

  There was wonderment in the old innkeeper’s eyes.

  “And more,” he said. “I do believe the Other’s will never again be capable of attacking as a armed force. We have found a way to stop them.” Martin had been thinking the same thing…with one of these ‘water cannons’ every hundred yards along the wall the land would be safe and secure. He wasn’t about to start celebrating yet, though.

  “They will not be so unprepared to meet us again,” he said, remembering the siege at Derby. “Make sure the men have a full supply of shot…he will send the mind-slaves soon, for garlic and silver will not stop them.”

  Martin was proved right ten minutes later when the pipes ands drums took up their battle rhythm again, and pale figures began to come out of the dark, first in tens, then in hundreds, an army of the enslaved.

  “My God,” he heard Fitz exclaim. “There are thousands of them.”

  And now it really begins.

  “Wait for my order,” he called out along the line. All around the circle of carts men were praying. Some even went as far as to clutch Bibles in their hands, as if the power of the Lord would somehow leech through into them.

  “Young Hillman!” Martin shouted. “Keep the cannon ready. I fear we will have more use for it ere too long.”

  He saw that the pale attackers had drawn closer.

  “Fire at will!” he called, and the air filled with the noise of gunshot and the stench of death.

  The defenders circle was tight enough that the men were two ranks deep, three in places. They were able to pour volley after volley into the approaching mind-slaves.

  But all they were achieving was the slowdown of the attack. The enslaved came on over the bodies of the fallen, and Martin knew that the Boy-King cared not how many fell…he had no concern for the lives of men-and-only-men…there were always more recruits available.

  Smoke hung heavy over the defenders, and the acrid stench of gunpowder and burnt flesh caught in the back of the throats. The nearest of the attackers was now no more than ten yards from the defensive line.

  Martin looked over at Fitz. The innkeeper was stoking his old blunderbuss with what looked like a pound of shot. His face was streaked with powder and sweat, and there was a grim, hard resolve in the set of his features. Martin realized that the same expression could be seen all around the circle, and the same one was probably on his face.

  The innkeeper fired the blunderbuss, and, without even looking at its effect, immediately began to reload.

  Martin saw what had happened, though. Five of the attackers had fallen, their flesh torn to shreds. The ranks behind merely walked over the fallen as if they did not exist.

  “How can we fight such as these?” he said, having to shout to be heard above the cacophony.

  “With heart and soul,” Fitz said, grimly. “There is no other way, no matter who, or what you are fighting.”

  Martin wished for the stout defense of his wall at Milecastle, but all they had were the wooden carts and their horses. And soon the defenses would be sore tested, for the attacking line was only five yards away. They were dying in vast numbers, but still they came on, inexorable, relentless, driven.

  “If you have any tricks up your sleeves, now is the time,” Fitz said.

  Sean Grant ran with the wind, bounding over both heather and rock alike, as fleet as a March hare, as sure of his footing as a mountain goat.

  At one point he discarded his leather coat and let it fall… it was merely slow
ing him down. The red haze of the ‘wrongness’ drew him on like a beacon, northwards. He knew that his quarry was near the estuary, and he was proved right when he came round the side of a small hill and found himself looking down on a squat black watchtower overlooking a small harbor.

  There was a black boat moored at the dock, and it itself carried a red haze that sent a dark chord singing in Sean’s head. But the focus, the thing that had drawn Sean here, was centered in the black tower. The red haze hung heavy over it, fading and glowing in time with the heartbeat of the child inside.

  Sean leapt forward, and was at the main door of the tower in a blink. He raised a foot to kick in the door.

  “NO!” The Boy-King screamed inside Sean’s head.

  “YES!” Sean screamed back, and was gratified to be given the sight of the Boy-King falling to the ground, blood pouring from eyes, nose and ears.

  Sean followed through on the kick and knocked the door off its hinges, where it fell to the floor with a crash that echoed in the suddenly still night. He stepped over, and into the blackness beyond.

  The first of the attackers was now pressed up tight against the cart beneath Martin. Fitz had taken to using the blunderbuss as a club, wielding it with such force that it caved in the heads of any that were unfortunate enough to come within his reach.

  All along the defensive line hand-to-hand fighting broke out, and at the far edge of the circle from Martin and Fitz one of the carts suddenly overturned. The troopers fell back, and a horde of shambling mind-slaves filled the gap.

  “Milecastle!” Martin shouted, and leapt from the cart, his musket raised like a club.

  He took the first one in the ribs, and felt bones break as he hit it again, but the second blow snapped his musket in two, and he only had time to step inside a flailing punch before he was in the middle of a rolling melee.

  Rage grew in him as he punched and gouged, and once more he felt the ripple of thick hair erupt and spread up his arm. His nails became talons as he reached forward, meaning to rip the throat from the pale thing that faced him.

  And suddenly the glazed look left the mind-slave’s eyes and it backed away from Martin, screaming in fear.

  But the rage still held him and Martin grabbed the retreating man by the throat. His grip was tightening when the man spoke.

  “Please. Don’t kill me…Please.”

  “I am the Balance,” Martin said.

  His grip loosened.

  “I am the Balance.” The wolf’s hairs receded as fast as they had come. He opened his hand and freed the man from his grip.

  All around the circle those suddenly released from the thrall of the Boy-King were fleeing in terror and confusion. Some, clearly driven mad, continued fighting, but they were easily quelled, and in a matter of minutes the moor was once again quiet apart from a forlorn wailing of a lost soul out in the darkness.

  Martin held his hand in front of his face. He remembered the hairs, the talons. But now there was only his own grime-covered skin.

  “I am the Balance,” he said, and gasped as the hairs once more sprouted on the back of his hand. He felt tension grow in him, then ebb as he brought to mind the Woodsman’s tune.

  I control you. You are merely part of what I am, he thought.

  If there was anything inside to answer him it kept quiet. Fitz looked at him…a puzzled look.

  “It did not happen this time,” the innkeeper said. “I told you it was the stress of losing the old man that set you off in Derby.”

  Martin realized that Fitz did not know about the wolf’s re-appearance in Newcastleton or Stirling.

  If we live through this night I will allow him to get me drunk…then I’ll tell him…if I can.

  “Make sure the men are restocked with shot and anything else they need. And get that cart back on its wheels…I don’t know what happened to the mind-slaves, but there is still an army of Others out there.”

  While Fitz went to carry out his orders Martin inspected the troopers. Miraculously, they had suffered no fatalities. There were three wounded…one broken leg from a man under the cart when it toppled…one broken nose from a punch, and one with a badly bitten leg. None were life threatening.

  He found Harold and Edward Hillman with Megan. They were helping to serve the troopers with ale or water.

  “Pardon me, milady,” he said. “But I must take our cannon-maker back to his work. We need to be ready.”

  “Take him, then,” Megan said. “But woe betide you if he comes to harm.”

  “No Other will harm him,” Harold said. “For he would just bore them to the final death with his toys.”

  “They’re not toys…” Edward began, but was unable to continue as Megan cuffed both boys around the ears.

  “Get off with you both,” she said.

  The boys ran off laughing.

  “They are fine boys,” Megan said.

  “Aye. And they need a mother,” Martin replied.

  “She already has a son,” a voice they both recognized called out from the dark. Martin knew who it was even before he turned.

  Out in the dark, just beyond the churned up mess that marked the range of Hillman’s cannon, Gord Rollo stood at the head of a vast throng of Others.

  Sean strode through the blackness inside the tower as if it was fully lit by torchlight. The sense of wrong was so strong that it buzzed in his head and vibrated through his teeth, sending a throbbing through his skull. He was close. And getting closer.

  “My King has given me the honor of finally ridding him of an irritation,” Rollo said.

  “Come closer if you have an itch!” Fitz called back. “I will be happy to scratch it for you.”

  Rollo merely laughed.

  “I will clasp myself to you one more time, old man,” the Other said. “But first we must find out if you yet remember how to fight us.”

  Rollo raised an arm, and once more the pipes and drums echoed across the moor and the army of Others began to move forward.

  “This is madness,” Martin said. “The water cannon will destroy them.”

  “That it might,” Fitz said. “But there is an awful lot of them.”

  “Then let us have at it,” Martin said grimly. “Master Hillman…start it up once more. Let us test their taste for garlic and silver.”

  The arc of water shone in the moonlight like a silver bridge. The first splash hit the ground just in front of Rollo, forcing the Other to step backwards. Martin smiled, and was about to call out a mocking jeer when he saw that Rollo was watching the cannon’s spray closely, assessing its trajectory and timing the sweep as it panned from left to right.

  He saw immediately what the Other was searching for.

  “Fitz. To the bellows. There is a spot on our left where the cannon is no more than a fine spray.”

  Rollo had noticed it too, and was directing the throng of Others in that direction. Soon they started to push through the thin sheet of falling water. Small flames and lesions burst from their skin, and their feet smoked where they trod on the sodden ground, but they kept coming on, even after they came into range of Martin and Fitz’s bellows. By sheer force of numbers they were forcing their way closer to the small circle of defenders. Soon they were close enough for Martin to see the bloodlust in their eyes.

  The ground floor of the black tower proved to be silent and empty, but Sean already knew that what he sought was above him. He could feel the wrongness of it pressing down on him like a dead weight.

  He took the stairs two at a time and burst through the door at the top.

  “Always in a hurry,” a voice said. “And look how pale you are. You must remember to feed, my boy, or you’ll never reach your maturity.”

  He was in a bedchamber, one dominated by a huge, ornate four-poster bed. Mary Campbell lay on the bed, on top of the covers. Her belly was swollen and distended, black veins crawling over it as if it was a piece of living marble. She was naked, but Sean did not see that. He saw only her hair, now full blood red,
and her eyes, filled with crimson gore that ran in runnels down her cheeks.

  At each corner of the four-poster stood a guard…four ancient Others in full highland regalia. Each rested their crossed palms on the hilts of heavy broadswords, and their eyes stared at Sean with a cold disdain. They did not move as Sean walked into the room.

  “A boy should be more circumspect in a lady’s chambers,” the voice said. Sean turned to his left. Standing by the fireplace was the huge bloated Other Sean had chased through the palace at Linlithgow.

  “Lord Falkirk,” Sean said. “I refuse to take lessons in manners from such as you.”

  The fat Other looked down at the blood and gore smeared over his clothing. “If I had known you were coming I would have made myself more presentable.”

  Sean unsheathed his sword. “I fear you will not have long to worry about your appearance,” he said, and moved forward.

  “Longer than you,” the Other said, and moved to one side. Sean found himself looking down into a familiar golden chalice, and there, in the midst of a lump of gore and gristle, a single, red eye started back at him. Sean felt a cold grip take hold in his mind.

  You are just in time, it said in his head. The blood of my blood will be hungry after his birthing.

  The garlic and silver rain was felling the Others in their hundreds, and most of the rest were soon dispatched by Fitz and Martin.

  “This is no way to fight!” Martin called. “Surely this cannot be their only strategy?”

  “I fear not, sir,” Fitz replied. “Look!”

  Beyond the veil of water six larger shapes loomed, approaching fast. Even before Martin had time to distinguish what they were, six horses pounded through the spray in a tight wedge. Each of the horses was covered head to toe in heavy swathes of cloth, but even then the red-flaring eyes showed they were full turned. And atop each horse sat a heavily swaddled figure, hunched close to the horses’ neck.

  “Fitz!” Martin shouted in alarm.

  “I see them,” the innkeeper said and together they turned the bellows. But they were too late.