by Frank Tuttle
“There’s not another door,” I said. I held my gun steady. I was out of rounds, but I doubted ancient Elves were versed enough in gun craft to know that.
“By now two dozen halfdead are out there waiting,” I said. “It’s over. You’re not walking out of here. Maybe we can make you a better deal than Hag Mary.”
And there he was, appearing out of thin air, just like Buttercup.
“You are not worthy to speak her name,” he said. Gone was Dutson’s calm visage. His face was twisted with rage, twisted so far beyond human it was a caricature—eyes huge and bugged, brows pulsing, jaw protruding, and teeth growing as I watched. “The Wise One alone is fit to rule! Soon all will bow to her, and acknowledge her power and beauty! “
“Sure, but can she cook?”
Teeth became tusks. Hands became claws. It screamed and leaped, teeth dripping something thick and yellow.
I sidestepped, hurled the boiling pot of chicken stock into its face.
It didn’t blink. It didn’t scream. It wiped its face and grinned and began shifting its weight from foot to foot.
“You said I’d not walk out. But I will. As Markhat.”
“You won’t fool anyone. I’m told I am unique.”
“And your friends—where are they, hmmm? Why haven’t they come in to join us?”
“I told them to stay back,” I lied. “I don’t need any help putting down a wood sprite like you.”
“They can’t get inside,” it said. “I have magic. Magic more powerful than anything you know. I’ll put on your skin and bathe myself in glamour and I’ll go out there and I’ll kill her first, you know. Right before I lean close, and whisper in her ear, and tell her I don’t love her anymore.”
I laid down my empty gun and put both hands on Toadsticker’s hilt.
“You don’t have to be her tool,” I said. “Hag Mary. Wise One. Whatever you want to call her. You think she won’t throw you away when she’s done? That’s how those people work. You know it.”
“I’ll gut your Darla like a fish. Show Darla her liver before she dies. Take a bite out of it before her eyes close.”
“Going to be hard to do without a head.”
It gave up all pretense of being human and rushed me, snarling and flailing.
I buried Toadsticker deep in its chest, meeting no more resistance than if I’d pierced a bag of feathers. I twisted the blade and the Elf laughed and picked me up and threw me across the kitchen. Then it snatched Toadsticker free and tossed the sword aside.
“She’ll die in agony, betrayed,” it said, its words rendered nearly unintelligible as they passed through a throat and lips no longer human. The Elf’s skin split and hung in great ragged strips. Greens and browns—vines and shoots, I realized—moved beneath.
I found my Army knife, plunged it into its right eye as it grabbed me by the chest. Something like sap spurted out. The Elf laughed.
“Time to die, mortal man,” it said. “I won’t even need your ears for the rest of the spell. I can kill them all, one by one. They trust you. Killing them will be so easy.”
My hand closed over the false huldra. I brought it forth and shoved it in the Elf’s misshapen face.
It laughed again, a merry tinkle that sounded of chimes and crystal.
“It’s not even a terribly convincing fake,” said the Elf. “Your blind little sorceress has none of the skill my Blessed Mistress shows.”
I cussed. Dutson, ever present, always there and handy with a beer and a snack. Always lurking close, unfailingly attentive, always ignored—Elf ears wide open and listening, catching every unguarded whisper.
The Elf’s mouth opened and filled with black thorns as long as knives. “Eat it anyway,” I said, and when it roared I shoved the false huldra right down his damned throat.
The false huldra erupted in flames in my grasp. Fire shot between my fingers and rolled down my forearm and roared into the Elf, and while the flames didn’t burn me, they blazed through him like flaming oil dumped on kindling.
The Elf flapped and flopped and flailed, limbs thrashing against me, drumming on the walls, beating hard against the floor. The Elf pulled and strained and heaved, but some force beyond either of us kept us locked in place while the furious flames did their work.
It burned, did the Elf. Burned hot and bright. The smoke from it was sweet, as though from some rare and treasured tree.
Ashes fell from inside it. Its movements slowed. Vines began to unravel from within him, trailing embers and smoke.
In a moment, it was over, and the remains of the Elf—the last Elf, for all I knew—fell smoking to the Queen’s kitchen floor.
Instantly, Buttercup’s banshee howl sounded again. Shouts rose up, and a bevy of wary halfdead charged in, weapons drawn, eyeing me with an unhealthy amount of suspicion.
I lowered my hand. It was empty, save for a handful of ashes and a few steaming drops of black wax.
“It’s me, gents. Captain Markhat.” I said, adding a hint of emphasis to the word ‘Captain.’ “We had a spy aboard. Now we don’t. How are things outside?”
Their weapons didn’t waver. Mama Hog forced her way through them and without a word tossed a loop of Buttercup’s stringy rope around my neck.
Buttercup’s howl ceased and she was suddenly there with me, arms wrapped around my knees.
“Let her in,” bellowed Mama. “It’s him.”
They parted for Darla, and we all hugged while Mama kicked at the Elf’s remains with the toe of her boot.
“I knowed it all along,” she muttered. “Ain’t nothin’ to ‘em but a handful of weeds.”
Stitches made her way inside. The rotary guns are too hot to fire, she said to the Avalante soldiers. Go. The constructs are massing.
The soldiers went.
I leaned against the cabinets. My side was beginning to ache where I’d struck the wall. I had bruised ribs, if not broken ones.
“Stitches.” Talking didn’t hurt, but pulling in the breath to speak above the din of gunfire did. “How long until you absolutely have to drop the shield?”
Two hours. At that point, if the shield remains, we will effectively be engulfed in the shadow realm.
“Is that two hours plus or minus, or precisely two hours?”
Precisely two hours.
Darla, always angelic, found an icebox and wrapped a good big scoop of ice in a burlap flour sack, which she pressed gently to my side.
“You think the Elf was communicating with the outside?”
It seems likely.
“So they’d know we have two hours before we make ourselves vulnerable. I assume we’re still heading south at what…twenty knots, figuring the current?”
I have no contact with the wheelhouse or the engine room. But yes, we are still underway, at speed.
“I’ve got two ideas. You’re going to hate both of them.”
The gunfire outside wasn’t slowing. Shouts for more ammunition and more rifles sounded. I couldn’t see out the kitchen door, but it seemed the bone-men were massing for a charge.
“First, we take the rotary guns and as much ammunition as we can carry, and we march right into the shadow. They’re not expecting that.”
Suicide. Sheer suicide. Even my limited exploration of that place revealed it to be populated by creatures against which the guns would have little or no effect.
“She’s right about that, boy. I got a glimpse myself. Ain’t got words for what I seen. We could each charge in with a handful of cannon and still end up stomped flat.”
“I told you you’d hate it.”
I do indeed.
“Then we’re left with an easy choice,” I said. “We hand everyone a gun and we line the outer decks and we drop the shield. That will close the door to the shadow realm, will it not?”
I believe so. It will also render us immediately vulnerable to Hag Mary and her allies, who we know to be waiting in ambush.
“If they’re planning an ambush, they’ll be massing t
heir main forces right at the spot they think we’ll be when the Queen’s shields fail. If you say we could hold out another two hours, and if we’re doing twenty knots, that might put them forty miles away.”
You realize this will be an arcane assault, and forty miles may make little difference to its execution.
“I know that. We might buy a few minutes, no more. We might be able to make for the riverbank, and we might get some of these people to safety. You have a better idea? Anyone?”
I shall need a moment to coordinate with the Regent.
“I don’t.” I was about to add a treasonous comment upon the Regent’s lack of involvement in the saving of his own hash when a pair of halfdead floated into the room and whispered to Stitches.
She dismissed them with a wave.
I shall see to the containment of the constructs while you coordinate the evacuation to the outer decks, she said.
“What about your word with the Regent?”
The Regent and his staff are gone. Vanished. Presumably via arcane means beyond detection by my skills or those of his adversaries.
Her voice maintained its careful neutrality, but the sutures in her lips beaded with tiny droplets of blood and she involuntarily clenched her jaw.
“Too bad. I was going to thank his girlfriend for adding her poison to the huldra. Or was that your magic that set him on fire?”
I have no such magic. She lowered her hood to hide her face. I wish you good fortune, Markhat.
“You should go with Darla and Mama,” I said. I showed her the key Evis had given me, to the false boiler and a hiding place. “You sure as hell don’t owe the Regent any loyalty. Not now.”
Stitches turned and walked away.
“I’m not hiding in any steel bowl,” said Darla.
“Me neither,” said Mama, loosing another savage kick at the smoldering remains of the Elf. “Might take me one of them fancy guns, though. I aims to do some harm.”
Buttercup looked up at me and grinned.
“Hell with it then,” I said. “Mama, I’ll get you a rifle. Buttercup too, maybe even a brace of cannon.”
Mama cussed and grabbed the little banshee and hauled her out of the kitchen. Darla and I kissed, checked our pistols, cleaned chicken broth off Toadsticker’s noble steel, and set about arming the survivors and warning them not to fire too soon or at each other.
Chapter Fifteen
The bone-men stood in clacking rows halfway to the stage.
Stitches fussed with the rotary guns, banging away at some brass mechanism with a hammer in a most unsorcerous fashion. A hundred halfdead ringed the advancing line of skeletons, rifles ready. Behind the riflemen stood more halfdead, each holding a fresh weapon and kneeling by a crate of ammunition.
The bone-men advanced another step, coming even with a chalk line inscribed on the floor.
The riflemen fired, working their bolts until their weapons were empty. Then they dropped them, grabbed the fresh ones handed to them by their reloaders, and started firing anew.
The bone-men fell in scores. The smoke from the rifles filled the ruined casino with a thick and choking fog. Lady Rondalee still held the stage, her voice a dry croak, but her words still sounding.
I counted a dozen dancers limp and pale, still moving though dead or nearly so. Evis and Gertriss still held their heads upright, still showed signs of life in their movements.
“What about them?” said Darla, tearing her eyes away from Gertriss and Evis.
“When the shadow gate closes, the music box will be inside. They’ll stop dancing. You’ll see.”
“You’re makin’ that up, boy. Though it does make a kind of sense.”
“With any luck, as soon as we close the shadow, the music box will start making those damned things in the shadow dance.” I had a brief vision of the monstrous, shambling hulks I’d seen in that place, locked forever in some clumsy round of pirouettes twenty stories tall.
That’s what you get for hurting my friends, I thought. Dance ’til Doomsday, you bastards.
Mama stomped hard on my foot.
“What the hell was that for?”
“Sorry, boy, you got a funny look all the sudden. All glazed over like. Thought you was about to start dancing with them others.”
“Smoke got in my eyes. Save it for Hag Mary, Mama.”
Another wave of skeletons poured out of the gap in the Queen’s hull. This time, though, something came with them.
I used to fish the Brown, like every other poor kid in the city. We’d sneak into the big lumber yards and dig at the edges of the mountains of sawdust. There we’d find enormous, fat nightcrawler worms, perfect for catching Brown River catfish.
This was like those nightcrawler worms, only as big around as I was tall. It glistened, and its segmented, oily body heaved and pulsed. It knocked bone-men aside and ground them into splinters as it struggled to push its bulk toward us.
Stitches gave the rotary gun a final savage blow and brought it to bear, cranking it with her pale, thin arm. It erupted in gunfire, and the rounds slammed full into the eyeless face of the worm.
The worm raised up, its end splitting into a wet opening lined with spikes. It howled as the rounds sank in. Thin, black blood spewed with each impact. It made a deep, gurgling roar and surged forward, rising higher, towering above Stitches.
A halfdead leaped to the other gun and began cranking and firing. He stitched a line of wounds across its neck. Black blood splashed and flew, but the creature kept coming.
Stitches backed away from her gun. A halfdead leaped to her place. She lifted her hands, filled them with light, and hurled an infant sun toward the worm.
The Queen shook, her deck heaving as the thing slammed its bulk down and then—flames coursing from its maw—it began to flail wildly about, striking the deck again, the ceiling, the walls. The guns followed it as best they could, sending wood chips flying and probably carving fist-sized holes in the deck and the hull.
Skeletons swarmed about, nearly lost in the smoke and the dark. All but one of the massive hanging lights were extinguished by the worm’s death throes, leaving us all half-blind.
A grinning skeleton gave itself away by clacking its teeth. I shattered its skull with a wild shot, and saw other, furtive scurryings in the smoke.
“Stitches, it’s time!” I yelled. Darla took down another bone-man a few yards away. Mama threw a chair at a pair of bony knees and brought her boot down on its skull when it fell. The bone-men managed to send at least a dozen of their fellows past the last chalk line.
Stitches climbed atop a felt-covered card table. Halfdead gathered in a ring around her, swords and rifles at the ready.
Stitches raised her glass staff, and a blinding spark of light grew within it.
“Mama, keep a hand on Buttercup. Darla, stay close. Let’s go.”
I led them out through the doors. Out of the choking gun-smoke and the stink of the worm thing’s dark blood. Out onto the Queen’s porched decks, where lines of nervous faces kept watch on the dark.
“Be ready, people,” I shouted. “Don’t be in a hurry. Don’t shoot your neighbors. Don’t jump in the river unless you can swim.”
All was quiet for a moment. Muddy water rushed past. Above, there was moonless night, the usual stars, a distant river-bank lined with the tall, black boughs of deep forest.
Mama rested the barrel of her rifle on the rail. “Boy, how do I shoot this contraption, again? Pull this?”
Before I could warn her, she tugged at the trigger, and the rifle jumped and barked.
Night gave way briefly to day. The primal father of all thunder cracked the sky and sounded across the river.
“Damn, boy,” said Mama in hushed tones of awe.
Half a dozen other shots rang out. I cussed and yelled for them to cease firing, all the while blinking and straining to see beyond the rail.
The brief flash had rendered us all half-blind. I finally got them to stop firing about the time I could see
again.
The river hadn’t changed. Neither had the sky or the trees.
A ragged cheer rose up. Shouts began to sound from below decks. A door opened, and a pair of Ogres poured out, clubs held at the ready, hooting questions none of us could answer.
The Queen shuddered. Her wheel picked up speed and her rudders bit hard. We turned to port, which I prayed was the closest patch of dry, solid ground.
Stitches emerged from the Queen’s interior. Gunshots still rang out from within, though they were rifle shots—not the thunder of the rotary guns.
We melted the barrels, she said. Some number rushed through. But the shadow is gone.
“Evis and the rest?”
No change. Yet. But take heart. The residual effects…
She just stopped talking. She threw back her hood and pointed toward the horizon.
Figures walked there, dark silhouettes like the trees, but moving and towering above them.
There was a man, in old-style armor, with horns on his helmet.
There was a tall, thin man bearing a staff.
Between them was a crone, hunched and bent, her hair as wild as Mama’s, her nails grown long and twisted.
“Damn damn damn,” said Mama. She wrestled with her gun, managed to jam it by pulling back the bolt without firing first. “I can’t swim, boy. But I reckon I might try anyways.”
The dark giants walked. Trees snapped and broke beneath their feet. Flocks of panicked birds rose up, wheeling away against the starry sky.
“Hag Mary and friends?”
The sorcerer is Daroth. The warrior was called Hurlt. I suspected Daroth, but thought Hurlt diminished.
“I don’t suppose they’ll agree to give us a two-hour head start?”
They reached the riverbank. I guessed we must have been a mile away, but they took up half the sky.
More gunfire sounded from within. A rotary gun fired, blazing away, either through a melted barrel or a fresh one. Men shouted. Ogres roared. A battle raged behind the casino doors, and I realized any of the monsters looking down upon the Queen could end it all, end us all, with a single godlike tread.
A voice sounded from the sky. I could not make out the words, though I could feel them rattle my chest.