What they saw there did not illuminate their ignorance at all. Three black spots against an Egyptian blue sky that grew and diverged slightly as they did so. Then suddenly the black spots resolved into entomopters and flew directly overhead. Several of the zombies tried to track them by looking up so keenly that they fell over, as boggled as any troupe of penguins overflown by an aircraft. The zombie advance halted in confusion and slapstick as the following ranks tripped over the freshly fallen or were knocked down like skittles.
* * *
From her high window, Lady Misericorde rolled her eyes with exasperation and went off to recover her dress from the chamber floor.
* * *
On every fuselage, navigation lights flared. While it might possibly make them a little easier to shoot down, that was better than colliding with another entomopter in the gathering dark. Miss Montgomery’s Warbirds crisscrossed the sky over the zombies’ heads, causing about as much dismay among their ranks as they had ever encountered post-mortem. Few people had much experience of being buzzed by low-flying aircraft, and the zombies had none. They were at a loss. Some wandered off in random directions, others waved wasted limbs in anger at their roaring tormentors, and many just fell over. The army of the dead that had left the castle now looked like an ill-starred attempt at the record for the world’s largest rugby scrum. As in confusion they rolled around, one of the entomopters, Striking Dragon, performed a stall turn and headed directly for them.
But while the Striking Dragon, piloted by the redoubtable Mink Choi, bears down upon the horde, we have time for a short and illuminating digression.
* * *
There are several methods of imperfect resurrection, the poor bastardised ways of raising the dead with which Johannes Cabal held no truck. While he searched for the path by which the dead can be brought back to life perfect in body, mind, and soul, most if not all other necromancers contented themselves with ways by which the dead can be put back on their feet to do simple, repetitive tasks. Working on plantations, mobbing the houses of critics, or making unsolicited telephone calls to sell patios and double glazing, these were all examples to which necromancers of greater or lesser vindictiveness and commercial acumen had set their creations. Such resurrections were comparatively simple, but—as alluded to previously—there is more than one way to skin a cat and then bring it back to life, should one be so disposed.
Firstly, there was the classic Voodoo approach. This hinged on ancient magics from the primordial past, held in the rituals of a thousand generations in Africa, and then diluted unforgivably in the space of a handful of years by, of all things, Roman Catholicism. The rituals and necessities were relatively straightforward, if lengthy in commission, and, at the end of it all, one was the proud possessor of a quiet, diligent, albeit unimaginative and inflexible servant. There was the detail about never allowing the zombie to taste salt or it would realise it was dead and wander off in a huff before returning to the soil. Still, that was a small detail and easily attended to through a long needle, strong thread, and a few minutes spent sewing up the zombie’s mouth. Practical, if aesthetically displeasing. Such creatures were rarely dangerous unless directly ordered to be so. Mass resurrections of the sort needed to raise an army were impossible. This, then, Johannes Cabal had concluded, was not the source of Lady Misericorde’s powers.
Next we have the corrupted zombie, created by the agency of a parasite that usurps the body’s architecture and uses the corpse as a vector by which to spread itself. These undead are, in essence, a virus writ large, subsuming humans to its cause of proliferation in the same way a virus does so with individual cells. No necromancer worth his or her salt—not even the underachieving ones—would stoop to such creations. Firstly, as a matter of pride. Secondly, as a matter of practicality. There is no controlling creatures such as these, no more than one may control a rabid dog.
Next there was, both to Cabal’s knowledge and damnable experience, the form of undead raised by the infamous Ereshkigal Working, upon which we have already touched. These were animated by a supernatural force of an atavistic nature, its primary concern being reproduction. Reproduction for zombies is, aesthetically fortunately while practically unhappily, attained by killing. While the ritual keeps the lightest of leashes on the growing mob of undead it creates, this lasts until the caster falls asleep, at which point the leash is slipped, the foolish ritualist is added to his or her own army by being murdered while dreaming, and the horde grows geometrically unless halted using extreme measures.
Interestingly, these latter stages of the Ereshkigal Working are not mentioned in the rare parchments that survive. Most occultists guess that the very intelligence that animates the dead may well be the one that whispered the ritual into the minds of gullible Mesopotamian magicians all those millennia ago and skipped the bit about an inevitable zombie apocalypse following. Misericorde, however, had undoubtedly slept many times since creating her rotting regiment and had never once lost control. She, at least, had the sense to leave the Ereshkigal Working well alone.
The next category was a narrow and unusual one—machine zombies. Cabal had encountered their like precisely once and was not keen to repeat the experience. These poor wretches were a combination of flesh and metal, the former enforced and directed by the latter, and the spark of life kept burning through the agency of electricity. They were, however, very easy to identify thanks to all the metal bits melding into the flesh on limbs and head. This, he had been assured by those with direct experience of Misericorde’s corps of cadavers, was certainly not the case here.
Thus, by a steady process of deduction, Cabal had arrived at the only remaining method by which he believed his counterpart within the Ministerium could have made her army.
In any event, Cabal was certain that Lady Misericorde had turned to good, old-school diabolism, her wonder to perform. She had contacted a demon—probably the long-suffering Lucifuge Rofocale*—sold her soul, and gained powers thereby. This was an eminently understandable route to take if one sought only direct influence by the technique of setting zombies on anyone who presented difficulties. In research terms it was an occult-de-sac, to coin a phrase, long since explored and abandoned by Cabal.
Still, he had an understanding of what faced the—for want of a better term, taking in secret societies, assassins, a necromancer, and a vampire—‘good guys’ far beyond that of the average man on the Clapham omnibus, who would be dismayed by zombies but fail to observe them analytically as they made their way up the spiral stairs to the top deck of the omnibus. Very dismayed.
This was the state of knowledge upon which plans had been enacted.
* * *
Just as the Striking Dragon was about to overfly the zombies, there was a metallic clink audible even over the sound of the engine and the wings, and a cloud started to form in the entomopter’s wake. It was light and misty, and was whirled easily into complex curlicues by the turbulence of the aircraft’s passage. Thence, it settled in a wide bloom, a ghostly ribbon that hung over the zombies until, with another clink, the ribbon was cut. That which had been laid fell slowly upon the creatures below, and so soft and fine was it, none of them noticed it. Not, at least, until it reached them. Then they certainly noticed it, yes, indeed.
For where it touched bare dead skin, each tiny droplet took offence at the devlish nature of these particular examples of the walking dead, and manifested that offence by burning with a bright blue ghostly flame of outraged purity. One tiny mote created one flare of azure about the size of a freshly struck match, and every zombie was hit with hundreds or thousands.
With a great cry and a roar of supernatural combustion, Lady Misericorde’s army burst into flames.
They staggered around, more so than usual, and when they staggered into one another, the flames combined and were magnified. Where there were stragglers, Striking Dragon sought them out and struck them down. Every pass laid down more clouds, and after every pass the flames grew less as the tainted flesh burned and the
spirits of the dead were released to finish their journeys to wherever they were supposed to be going before the uncalled-for interruption of zombification.
* * *
At a balcony, Lady Misericorde watched the conflagration with tight lips. By her stood a bear of a man in tweed and an unconscionable beard.
‘Holy water,’ she muttered. ‘How did they know?’
‘Johannes Cabal,’ said the man.
‘Of course. I had hoped they might use more conventional means. More time-consuming means.’
‘Cabal is a nuisance and a danger, my lady.’
‘Precisely. That’s what Her Majesty in Crimson was counting upon. Still…’ She watched a burning zombie topple into the moat. It continued to burn as it sank, a diminishing blue glow coruscating beneath the surface. ‘I doubt she was expecting him to be quite this efficient.’
Off to the south, a howl shuddered through the night. Lady Misericorde nodded and allowed herself a small smile. ‘Ah, finally. Alsager has got his animals together. Perhaps things will go back onto schedule now.’
* * *
Alsager’s menagerie of assorted metamorphic human/animals, animals that were actually humans, a few animals that sometimes pretended to be humans, and all shades in between came barrelling out of the castle like a mass escape from a zoological garden. They made a sweeping turn as they came out of the guard post building at the outer end of the drawbridge, and headed as a broad wave of claws and teeth towards the attacking force, tending their route over a little to avoid the powdery pile of former zombies and the few still animated examples that were floundering around as the holy fire devoured them.
‘They really are terrifically predictable,’ noted Professor Stone, and raised a Very pistol. A moment later, a white star shell was rising into the heavens.
The Warbirds barely needed the signal. They had already spotted the new threat and were responding to it as had been decided earlier in the day. Striking Dragon swung around the battlefield, while Spirit of ’76 and Buzzbomb formed up in echelon, Dea Boom’s bird leading and to the north. As they got within two hundred yards of the lycanthropes, she put her entomopter’s nose down and opened fire.
Contrary to popular expectation, machine-gun fire rarely causes great gouts of earth to plume up dramatically under the impact of a few grains of lead. Instead they usually insert themselves under the sod with little fuss but for perhaps a few bits of soil being tossed into the air, shook loose by the admittedly fierce transfer of energy from the decelerating bullet. On a hard surface, impacts may be seen, and on a baked earthy surface, perhaps you might get something like those little fountains of dust so beloved of the cinematicians.
Alsager’s lycanthropes were offered no such aesthetically pleasing sight. The twin lines of fire stitched the ground towards them, and it was only the tracer rounds mixed into the guns’ ammunition that made them think that perhaps they weren’t standing in the ideal place. A kitsune was struck and fell wordlessly, for not all lycanthropes share the werewolves’ resistance to non-silver munitions. Indeed, one of the wolfmen stopped and threw up his arms in contemptuous challenge.
‘Your feeble bullets cannot harm me!’ he cried in a voice half human bellow and half lupine howl. Unhappily, these were to be his last words, as the entomopter’s guns bore an ammunition mix that included 10 percent silver rounds. Still, at least he found a sort of immortality as an amusing anecdote bandied around in the more esoteric circles.
Devlin Alsager roared at his troops, ‘Get out of the way, you fools! Up against the riverbank!’
There was a surge in their ranks as they obeyed, although whether out of obedience or simply because it was away from the line of the strafing run is open to interpretation. They crowded in close, but continued to move towards the Templar line, the sooner to be out of the confined area and into the enemy ranks where the Warbirds dare not attack. So busy were they in this that none noticed the trailing Warbird sashay lazily north to bring itself on a run for their new position.
As it approached, valves clicked, and another haze of atomised liquid from the entomopter’s crop-spraying nozzles started to drift down. The mist was thick this time, a product of the Copperhead’s larger cargo capacity, and dense wreaths of spray fell upon the shapechangers.
Alsager shook his clawed fist as the aircraft passed over him, barely thirty feet above. ‘Holy water?’ he shouted derisively. ‘What’s this? You think we’re like Misericorde’s useless creatures? Or…’ He laughed, a horrid barking noise. ‘You’re blessing us? How sweet! How thoughtful! How…’
It was then that the scent of the mist finally reached his nostrils. He had been aware of something almost immediately, but had dismissed it as part of the entomopter’s exhaust. Now he knew differently.
The Spirit of ’76 was venting aviation fuel spirit.
He saw Striking Dragon and Buzzbomb bearing down on his troop, already committed to a strafing run.
‘… shit,’ he said, which was less amusing as last words go. ‘Shitshitshitshitshitshi…’
Mink’s guns blazed, their bullet streams blazed with tracers, and—when the bright rounds penetrated the bank of fuel vapour floating over the lycanthropes—the air blazed, too, albeit briefly. Cabal had explained that such a mist would not merely burn, but would explode. He had been exactly right. The timing of the attack run had been precise; the lead entomopter was already a quarter of a mile away with its throttles fully open to escape the blast, and the aircraft assigned to light the cloud had banked up and clear as soon as its short bursts of fire—dense with tracer rounds—was airborne.
The blast was perfunctory and brutal. Those directly beneath were crushed and burned, those to the edges thrown by the massive over-pressure wave. A rakshasa, screaming like a cat, was flung clean across the river moat, cartwheeling as it flew, to smash into the castle wall and fall silently to the ground. Those who were not burnt had their lungs exploded inside their chests, their eardrums shattered, their eyeballs crushed.
The violence of the concussion startled even the attacking force despite their expectation of it, and the firing from their ranks halted. The shapechangers lay mangled and more than dead. Here and there, there was movement—a maimed werebear here, a disembowelled werefox there clung pitifully to their lives. Ensuring their weapons were charged with silver, the attackers advanced to deal with the survivors.
The line faltered as, from the veil of smoke and steam boiled from flesh and grass, a huge figure emerged at a charge. Its hide burnt, and the tussock of coarse black hair between its shoulders alight, the werebull—Minotaur incarnate—bore down upon the shocked ranks of the secret societies.
There was a remarkably loud bang. The werebull carried on running for several more steps until its metabolism regretfully admitted that even its autonomic processes were having a few problems getting along now that the werebull’s brain had been comprehensively liquefied, at which point the creature fell forward nervelessly to lie twitching on the sod. Slowly, it started to metamorphose into its human form, an accounts payable clerk from a stationery company in Basingstoke.
Atropos Straka patted the breach of the borrowed Holland & Holland .577 Nitro Express elephant gun appreciatively. The effect of the massive 750-grain bullet had been most gratifying. Her shoulder would be sorely bruised come the morning, she knew, but that was better than being gored by a werebull. The necromancer Cabal had offered the gun to her when he had decided that it was too bulky a weapon to be used during the infiltration and, in any case, the Ministerium’s heavy forces would be outside the castle if all went to plan. She nodded to those nearby, many of whom were twitching their heads in an effort to dissipate the ringing in their ears.
‘I like this gun,’ said Atropos Straka. ‘It is a good gun.’
Professor Stone glanced back and saw Korka Olvirdóttir looking nervously ahead. She caught his glance and gave him a smile and thumbs-up, but her smile was wan. He could hardly blame her. Cabal had dissected the likely
waves of the attack for them in his interminable, frequently supercilious, but—it transpired—very accurate briefing. He had dismissed the undead as almost beneath his notice, the lycanthropes as only slightly more problematical, and he had proposed ways of wiping them out quickly and effectively that had proved themselves most dramatically. Then he had given his view of what the third wave must be and told them, ‘This is when you will likely die.’ Johannes Cabal might have many positive attributes, thought the professor, but rousing pep talks did not feature anywhere among them.
Chapter 18
IN WHICH MASKS FALL AWAY
The big man in the plus fours and monumental beard stood upon the flat, circular roof that, not so very long before, had seen an aeroyacht disgorge a bemused vampire. He looked down upon the vista to the west of the castle. Across the river, the agents of mundanity were advancing past the twice-dead zombies and the freshly exploded lycanthropes. They moved with discipline and caution; they knew what was coming.
Once, Rufus Maleficarus would have gloried in this moment, the dramatic pause before he poured terror and damnation upon his enemies. His father had been a performer, a practitioner of magics both illusory and real, and Rufus had followed in his path. His father had also been, by most lights, evil and insane. Rufus had followed him there, as well. Rufus had thundered and he had raged, never spoke when he might declaim, never moved but that he might pose.
Yet now he was quiet and composed. He gestured once, twice, and reality ripped in the air above him. The night’s sky glimmered as if the light reflected from a babbling brook had been magnified and placed there, floating in a scintillating rend through the dimensions. It only took a moment for the tear to be noticed by that which lay beyond, the light intensified, and a new monstrosity shouldered its way through.
Rufus Maleficarus watched it with bland disinterest; a glittering patch of spiky light that flickered and dazzled. It was most like a jellyfish, but not that alike. Yes, there was a head analogous to the dome of a jellyfish, but this was more acutely angled, more akin to the head of a pencil. Yes, there were things like tentacles, but these hung heavily like roots from an unearthed plant, bifurcating and rejoining with themselves and their neighbours to form an untidy mass of bedragglement. Hanging further than these, however, was one longer tentacle, discrete and distinct from the others, from the creature’s central axis. Unlike its listless fellows, this appendage twitched and swayed as if sensing its surroundings. Yet the creature was strangely beautiful; it pulsed in brilliant colours forming ever-moving patterns in blurred ranks of shapes that seemed neither chaotic nor geometric. Nor, however, were they entirely comfortable viewing. There was a sense that there were other colours that existed outside human perception, but flickering, perhaps lapping, at the edge of it. Infra-violet, ultra-red, nowhere to be found on the electromagnetic spectrum as understood by any creature of Earth.* The patterns and the colours made the creature very hard to look at. Then, the observers realised to their rising dread, it also made them impossible to look away from.
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