by Jim Butcher
“Friend of yours?” I asked.
“Holliday,” Earp confirmed. “Good fella to have with you when it’s rough. Plus he’s got two of them Venator pendants around his neck. Took one from some fool in a faro game.”
“I need to know,” I said, “if you mean to take the Thule Society’s offer seriously.”
“Can’t do that, Miss Anastasia,” Earp said. “They’re only offering me something I can get for myself just as well.”
I found myself smiling at that. “You’re willing to challenge an entire town to a fight? For the sake of your friend’s saloon?”
“It ain’t the saloon, ma’am,” Earp drawled. “It’s the principle of the thing. Man can’t let himself get run out of town by a mob, or pretty soon everyone will be doing it.”
“If a mob is responsible,” I said, smiling, “is not something close to everyone already doing it?”
Earp’s eyes wrinkled at that, and he tapped the brim of his cap.
“Idiot,” said the German from the cell, contempt in his voice.
“Sometimes,” Earp allowed. He shut the peephole and said, “Those Thule bastards ain’t going to wait half an hour. Snakes like that will come early.”
“I agree,” I said. “But going out shooting seems an unlikely plan.”
“Can’t disagree,” Earp said. “Course, maybe it’s just a man’s pride talkin’, but it seems like it ain’t much of an idea for them to try to come in here, either.”
It was then that the drum began beating, a slow, steady cadence in the darkness.
I felt my breath catch.
The German smiled.
Earp looked at me sharply and asked, “What’s that mean?”
“Trouble,” I said. I shot a hard glance at the German. “We’ve made a mistake.”
The German’s smile widened. His eyes closed beatifically.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
He said nothing.
“What the hell is going on?” Earp said, not in an unpleasant tone.
“This man is no mere member of the Thule Society,” I said. I turned my attention toward the outside of the jailhouse, where I could already feel dark, cold, slithering energy beginning to gather. “We are dealing with necromancers. They’re calling out the dead. Is there a cemetery nearby?”
“Yep,” Earp said. “Boot Hill.”
“Deputy,” I said. “We need to plan.”
“SHOOT,” EARP SAID a quarter of an hour later, staring out the peephole. “I didn’t much like these fellas the first time I shot them.” He had added another revolver to his belt, and had traded in his shotgun for a repeating rifle. “And time ain’t been kind. I make it over thirty.”
I stepped up next to Earp and stood on my tiptoes to peer out the peephole. We had dimmed the lights to almost nothing, and there was just enough moon to let me see grim, silent figures limping and shambling down the street toward the jailhouse. They were corpses, mostly gone to bone and gruesome scraps of leathery skin with occasional patches of stringy, brittle hair.
“There’s some more, coming up on that side,” Earp said. “Forty. Maybe forty-five.”
“Properly used, a dozen would be enough to kill us both,” I said to him. I took a brief chance and opened my third eye, examining the flow of energies around the oncoming horrors. “We are fortunate. These are not fully realized undead. Whoever called them up is not yet an adept at doing so. These things are scarcely more than constructs—merely deadly and mostly invulnerable.”
He eyed me obliquely. “Miss Anastasia, that ain’t what a reasonable man would call comfortin’.”
I felt my lips compress into a smile. “After a certain point, the numbers hardly matter. The drum beats for their hearts—it both controls the constructs and animates them. Stop that and we stop them all, even if there were a thousand.”
“And until then?”
“Until then, aim for the head. That should disrupt the spell controlling them.”
Earp looked over his shoulder at the German. The man looked considerably less smug or comfortable than he had throughout the evening. At my direction, Earp had hog-tied him to one of the wooden pillars supporting the roof and gagged him thoroughly. I had chalked a circle of power around him and infused it with enough energy to prevent him from reaching outside of it for any magical power. They were crude precautions, but we could not afford to give the German an opportunity to strike at us while we were distracted. Such measures would hinder any particularly dangerous attack—and would not stop Earp’s bullet from finding the German’s skull, should he attempt anything that was not instantly lethal.
I stepped back from the window, closed my eyes, and invoked the communication spell I had established with the näcken.
Karl, I murmured with my thoughts, are you ready?
Obviously, the näcken replied.
Have you located the Thule Society?
There was an amused tint to the dark faerie’s reply. On the roof of a building three doors down and across the street. They seem to think that they have warded themselves from sight.
Excellent, I replied. Then we will begin shortly.
Four warlocks, Karl mused. You realize that your death releases me from our contract?
I ground my teeth without replying. Then I cocked my revolver, turned to Earp, and nodded.
“Seems like a bad hand, Miss Anastasia,” Earp said. “But let’s play it out.”
And with no more fanfare than that, Wyatt Earp calmly opened the door to the jailhouse, raised his rifle to his shoulder, and walked out shooting, and I went out behind him.
Earp was a professional. He did not shoot rapidly. He lined the rifle’s sights upon the nearest shambling figure and dropped a heavy round through its skull. Before the corpse’s knees began to buckle, he had ejected the shell and taken aim at the next nearest. That shot bellowed out, and as the sound of it faded, the crowd of corpses let out a terrifying wave of dry, dusty howls and began launching themselves forward in a frenzied lurch.
I raised my Webley, took aim, and dropped a corpse of my own—though in the time it took me to do it, Earp had felled three more without ever seeming to rush.
“Karl!” I screamed.
There was a thunder of hooves striking the earthen street and the enormous white horse appeared like a specter out of the night. The näcken simply ran down half a dozen corpses, shouldered two more out of the way, and kicked another in the chest with such force that it flew backward across the street and exploded into a cloud of spinning, shattered bone.
I swung up onto the näcken’s back, as summer lightning flickered and showed me the dead moving forward like an inevitable tide. Two more of the things reached for me, bony fingers clawing. I kicked one away and shot the other through the skull with the Webley, and then Karl surged forward.
I cast a glance back over one shoulder to see Earp grip the emptied rifle’s barrel and smash a corpse’s skull with the stock. That bought him enough time to back toward the jailhouse door, drawing a revolver into each hand. Shots began to ring out in steady, metronomic time.
“To the roof!” I snarled to the näcken.
And the dark fae let go of his disguise.
White horseflesh swelled and split as it darkened to a sickly, drowned blue-grey. A hideous stench filled the air, and the näcken’s body bloated to nearly impossible dimensions. The smell of fetid water and rotten meat rose from Karl’s body in a smothering miasma, and with a surge of power that threatened to throw me from his back entirely, despite the saddle, the näcken leapt from the street to the balcony of a nearby building, bounding to the lower roof of the building next to it, then reversed direction and flung itself onto the roof of the original.
The Thule Society awaited us.
The roof was a flat space and not overly large. Much of it had been filled with a painted pentacle, the points of its star lapping outside of the binding circle around it—a symbol of chaos and entropy, unbounded by the circle of will and r
estraint. That same cold and horrible energy I’d felt earlier shuddered thick in the air. Torches burned green at each point of the star—and at the center knelt my quarry, the warlock Alexander Page, a plump, lemon-faced young man, beating steady time on a drum that looked like something of Indian manufacture.
The Briton and the other two Thules stood in a protective triangle around Page, outside the circle. The Briton’s eyes widened as the savage näcken landed on the roof, shaking the boards beneath everyone’s feet with his weight and power.
“Kill the Warden!” the Briton shouted.
He flung out his hand, and a greenish flicker of lightning lashed across the space between us. I stood ready to parry the spell, but it was poorly aimed and flew well wide of me—though it struck Karl along his rear legs.
The näcken bucked in agony and screamed in rage. I flew clear, barely controlling my dismount enough to land on the building rather than being flung to the street below. I landed on my feet and rolled to one side, avoiding a cloud of evil-looking spiders marked with a red hourglass, which one of the other Thule sorcerers summoned and flung at me.
I regained my feet and shot twice at him with the Webley—but the first shot was hurried, and the second wavered off course as the third Thule sorcerer called something like a small violet comet out of nowhere and sent it screaming toward my head. I lifted my left hand in a defensive gesture, shouting the word of a warding spell, and the thing shattered against an invisible barrier a foot from my head, exploding into white-hot shards that went hissing in every direction.
Page took one of them in the arm and let out a small shriek of startled agony, dropping the drumstick he held in his hand.
“No!” shrieked the Briton. “The Master is all that matters! Keep the beat!”
Page, his face twisted in agony, reached for the drumstick and resumed the rhythm—just as the näcken thundered furiously toward Page.
The three on their feet rushed to interpose themselves—even as the näcken crashed into the mordant power of the evil circle they’d infused, as helpless to cross into it as any fae would be.
But in the time it took them to realize that, I had caught my breath and my balance, aimed the Webley, and sent several ounces of lead thundering through the chest and, a heartbeat later, through the skull of the second Thule sorcerer.
Page screamed in terror. The third Thule spun to me and sent multiple comets shrieking toward me, howling curses with each throw. I discarded the emptied revolver and drew my blade. The enchanted silversteel shone brightly even in the dimness of the night, and with several swift cuts I sliced through the energies holding the attack spells together, disrupting them and changing them from dangerous explosives into exploding, dissipating clouds of violet sparks of light.
The Briton, meanwhile, dove out of the circle, spoke a thundering word of power, and sent Karl flying back through the air like a kicked kitten. The näcken screamed furiously and vanished into the darkness.
I had no time. I surged forward, striking down one deadly comet after another, and with a long lunge, rammed my slender blade into the third Thule’s mouth.
The blade bit deep, back through the palate and into the skull, and I could suddenly feel the man writhing and spasming through my grip on the sword, a sensation oddly like that of a fish hooking itself to an angler’s line. I twisted the blade and ripped it back in a swirling S motion, and as it came free of the sorcerer’s mouth it was followed by a fountain of gore.
I whirled, raising a shield with my left hand, and barely intercepted another strike of sickly green lightning. It exploded into a glowing cobweb pattern just in front of my outstretched hand, little streaks leaping out to scorch and burn the roof, starting half a dozen tiny fires.
“Grevane!” screamed Page.
“Drum!” thundered the Briton, even as he raised his hands above his head, his face twisting into a rictus.
And as swiftly as that, I heard the dry, clicking, rasping sound of the dead beginning to scale the building toward us.
Terror filled me. My allies were gone, and I was outnumbered two to one, even before one counted the coming terrors. Further, I’d felt the power of Grevane the Briton’s strike firsthand—and the man was no half-trained warlock, or even a senior sorcerer of the Thule Society. Strength like his could only come from one place.
He was a Wizard of the White Council.
And then, swift on the heels of my fear came another emotion. Rage, pure and undiluted, rage that this man, this creature, would spurn his responsibility to humanity and distort the power that created the universe itself into something so obscene, so foul.
He was a warlock. A traitor.
I flicked my sword into my left hand, then hurled my right hand forward, and a bolt of searing fire no thicker than my pinky finger lashed out at him, blinding in the night. Grevane parried the blow on a shield of his own and countered with more lightning. I caught part of it on the sword, but what got through was enough to drive me down to one knee and send agony racing back and forth through my nerve endings.
Even as I fought through the pain, I saw movement in the corner of my eye: the dead, swarming up the building and beginning to haul themselves onto the roof. In seconds, they would tear me apart.
I gritted my teeth, staggered back to my feet, and rushed forward, sword leading the way.
Grevane gathered more power, but held his strike until the last second as I closed on him—and then he bellowed something and smashed down at the roof beneath us with pure kinetic energy, opening an enormous gap just in front of me.
I dove to one side, a bound as light and graceful as any I had ever made, rolled, and felt the horrible, tingling, invasive presence of necromantic energy course over me as I crossed into their summoning circle—and drove my blade straight out to one side and into the heart of Alexander Page.
The warlock let out a short, croaking gasp. The drumstick fell from his suddenly nerveless hands, and, seconds later, silence reigned, marred only by the dry clatter of bones falling two stories down to the streets of Dodge City.
I stared at Grevane, crouched, as Page quivered on my sword. My left hand was lifted, a shield of pale blue energy already glowing, ready for the necromancer’s next attack.
But instead, Grevane tilted his head to one side, his eyes distant. He smiled faintly. Then, without a further word, he simply stepped backward and fell over the edge of the building, dropping silently into the darkness below.
I ripped the sword free of Page and sprinted to follow him—but by the time I got to the edge and looked down, I saw nothing. Nothing at all but bones in an empty street.
I was so focused on Grevane that I didn’t sense the attack coming at my back until it was nearly too late to survive it.
Pain, simple pain, suddenly fell upon me as if my entire body had suddenly been thrust into a raging fire. I let out a strangled scream, my back arching, and fought to simply keep from plummeting from the roof myself.
“Bitch,” Page panted. He staggered across the roof, one hand desperately trying to stem a steady pulse of blood from what would be, in a few moments, a fatal wound. “Warden bitch. Dolor igni!”
Pain wiped everything else from my mind for the space of several seconds. By the time I could see again, I was sprawled back over the edge of the roof, about to fall, and a deathly pale Page stood over me, holding my own sword to my throat.
“You’ve killed me, bitch,” he gasped. “But I won’t go to hell alone.”
I tried to thrash aside, to push the blade, but my body simply did not respond to me. Pure, frenzied, helpless terror, the kind I had previously known only in terrible dreams of running through quicksand, surged through me.
Page let out a frenzied little giggle and leaned on the sword.
And with a crack of thunder, his head snapped back into a cloud of misty gore. My sword fell from his fingers, and his body dropped limply down onto his legs, collapsing into an awkward pile.
I turned my head slowly.
Wyatt Earp stood on the street below, a trail of nearly headless dis-animated corpses strewn behind him, along with all but the last of the revolvers he’d been carrying.
He lowered the gun, and touched a finger to the brim of his hat in solemn salute.
“YOU SURE YOU can’t stay, Miss Anastasia?” Earp asked.
I shook my head. Karl, now back in his disguise, stamped an angry hoof onto the dirt of Dodge City’s streets as I loaded his saddlebags with fresh supplies. “I’m afraid I can’t. Not with those two still out there.”
Earp grunted. “I never seen someone so determined to skin himself out of some ropes,” he said. “Who was that German?”
I felt my mouth twist with distaste, even as a sour taste of fear touched my tongue. “If our information at the White Council is accurate, his name is Kemmler,” I said. “That Briton was one of his apprentices, Grevane.”
“Bad men?”
“Some of the most dangerous alive,” I said. “I have to get onto their trail while I still can.”
He nodded. “I hear you. Shame about that dinner, though.”
I winked down at him and said, “Perhaps another time.”
He smiled and tipped his hat slightly. Then he offered me his hand.
I shook it.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Think maybe I’d have won that twenty dollars off you.”
Instead of answering him, I opened my purse, fished out a golden coin, and flicked it to him. He caught it, grinning openly. “Have a drink for me, Deputy.”
“Think maybe I’ll do that,” he said. “Good hunting.”
“Thank you,” I said.
KARL AND I headed out of town as the sun began to rise.
“I’m tired,” the näcken said.
“As am I, Karl,” I replied.
“Kemmler,” said the näcken contemptuously. “You only found him to spite me. To keep me in this horrible place.”
“Do not be tiresome,” I said with a sigh. I checked the little leather medicine bag dangling from a thong. Earp had been quite right about Kemmler’s skinning out of ropes with which he’d been bound. The man had left enough skin behind for me to lock onto him with a tracking spell. The bag swung back and forth gently in the direction in which the greatest necromancer in the history of man had gone. “We only do our duty.”