by Glen Cook
“I almost got caught. Twice. The first time at the cemetery. Did you know that that place is overrun with wild dogs?”
The voice asked, “Did you get it?”
“I got it. But-”
“Excellent. Segdway. Bones. Help Mikon and Chick. Evil Lin. Take the wagon away once they get the coffin off. Drop it at least a mile from here and then just keep going.”
Evil Lin slurred something that made it sound like he was real excited about moving on and wanted to get to that as fast as he could.
He was beloved of the gods-providing Orchidia overlooked him.
Any villain who didn’t make tracks soon was likely to end up celebrating All-Souls from the nether side of life’s great divide.
The coffin tilted and rocked. The foot end went high. My head crashed into unpadded wood. That hurt like hell. Fierce old me, I managed not to bark or whine.
I heard the wagon roll, then stop again after just seconds. Evil Lin had come down with the drizzling shit horrors after catching a whiff from the clotted darkness where John Stretch and friends were communing with their spying regular rats.
After a few seconds Evil Lin took one exaggerated step directly away from the house where the coffin had just disappeared, making a statement. From now on he would have no part in anything. He would go away and be seen no more forever. And he started rolling again.
He will hear from John Stretch someday, even so, I’m sure.
What were Brownie and the girls doing? Like about every female in my life but Hagekagome, they were probably smarter than me and keeping their heads down. Hell, Vicious Min was probably smarter than me.
A voice said, “Set it on those chairs.”
The coffin tilted, rocked, chunked down onto something that creaked. I heard what sounded like somebody agitated trying to talk around a gag. Kevans, sounding more angry than frightened.
That was good, as long as she controlled that anger.
I tried hard to picture how many people were out there and where they were located. The element of surprise would have a very short half-life. I would need to remain the center of attention long enough for the Black Orchid to strike. But our future victims were not being cooperative. Hardly any said enough to give themselves away.
The one I thought was Magister Bezma said, “There’s something wrong. I feel it, Mikon. Did you see anything out there? What did you bring down upon us?”
“I saw some rat men.” Which was one hundred percent true.
“They belong. They’re Evil Lin’s people. That’s not it. There’s something else. But the rats and dragons would give warning, wouldn’t they?” He was talking to himself by then.
“Meyness. .”
“All right. You’re nervous. You’re upset. You aren’t invested in this. I understand. But be patient. Tomorrow will be a huge new day.”
Another voice said something. The magister responded, “I can only repeat what I just said. Come midnight, everything will change. Come midnight, I will gain the power to heal us all. But not before.”
The unintelligible voice got louder and angrier, presumably someone with a wounded friend who wouldn’t make it till midnight.
Voices rose. There was a scuffle. The mutineer might have paid the usual price of failure. Or, at least, he ended up of no value to Magister Bezma-who, in turn, ended up distracted from his concern about trouble gathering on his doorstep.
He emerged from the confrontation shouting, “Mikon, where are you going?”
“Uh. . I was going to look around outside, see if that attracted any attention.”
I didn’t buy it and I was inside a box, halfway panicked because I was inside a box, and couldn’t see Mikon’s face. How much less believable was he to someone standing in front of him who had known him all his life?
“I can’t manage this without you, Mikon.” Appeal and threat alike there, with the threat prevailing. “So get back in here and help.”
All Mikon had going now was a stall and a hope that the trouble he’d brought with him would pull him out of the deep dung.
I suspected that poor Mikon was going to get hosed one way or another. He was one of those guys who just can’t not put themselves into bad places.
Time passed faster than it felt like, trapped in there, and Magister Bezma was anxious to get on with things himself. He began ordering people around. Feet shuffled. Furniture scraped and thumped. People bickered. People complained. Kevans got very verbal after her gag slipped. She was in good shape for sure, nor was she as frightened or intimidated as she ought to be. But I heard nothing to tell me how Kip was faring. Kevans never spoke to him, which left me troubled.
I’d learn the good news or bad the hard way, once the lid came off.
Something whispered to me.
Something crossed my chest like a marching cockroach.
I came within an ounce and inch of screaming like a scared little girl.
Something was there in the coffin with me.
112
I didn’t abandon reason. That was unnecessary. Violet sparks identified my roommate.
How the devil. .?
While we were making the changeover from Morley to me. Had to have happened then.
That didn’t matter, though, did it? The critical thing was, the coffin now included a double dose of misery for whoever slipped its lid.
Could Tara Chayne be playing a practical joke? Why shoehorn that thing in here with me, otherwise? Unless inside the box was the only way to get it past Magister Bezma’s wards and traps.
Kevans began barking about being manhandled, reeling off blistering threats because somebody was mistreating somebody who wasn’t conscious-without once invoking her dire grandmother. The girl had guts.
Magister Bezma proved himself small by mocking her.
Mikon upbraided him for bullying a girl.
I was pleased, within limits. A man in a coffin certainly has those.
The yelling did bring home an important fact: Kip Prose was alive and probably healthy, if a little bit unconscious.
Bezma yelled some at someone about being more careful painting those damned lines. Ritualistic artistry was in progress. Kevans barked questions like a kid on a field trip instead of the altar, or victim, meant to be offered the darkness that would facilitate Bezma’s ritual.
She wasn’t frightened? Was she clueless? Stupid? Sure that help would swoop in on time? Or was she just unable to believe that anyone could be what Bezma was?
She had Shadowslinger for a grandmother. She could not possibly be that naive.
So. . Algardas were weird and she was a leader in the category.
The coffin shifted. The centipede scrambled. People outside grumbled. Bezma shrieked at somebody. Stress was getting to him. His henchmen weren’t being patient, just out of fear. He was being cut some slack because he was under such ferocious pressure.
Maybe he wasn’t a first-water asshole one hundred percent of the time. Maybe there were people who actually liked him.
No matter. He had my kids and his intentions weren’t good. He would’ve used my dead wife as a counter in his game, too, if I hadn’t gotten there first. I would cut him no slack. I wouldn’t be understanding.
Wouldn’t matter if I was. The Black Orchid and the Algarda tribe were thirsty for his blood. His own son was after him. The Machtkess sisters were stalking him. And then there was the little blonde, her friend, and his family. They fit in somewhere, too.
Purple sparks. Tiny, invisible claws digging in. A change in the racket from outside. .
Singing?
They were chanting in Old Karentine, which isn’t all that old. Most people can follow it if they concentrate and the speakers don’t rush or go all mush-mouth.
The Ritual was under way. And Kevans went right on making her opinion clear, loudly and explicitly. Why didn’t they put that gag back in?
The coffin shuddered as somebody pulled at the lid, untroubled by the fact that it wasn’t glass. Maybe they
didn’t know.
Maybe Mikon really would help scuttle his cousin’s game.
Maybe he’d do the right thing now that the crunch had come.
The chanting grew a little louder, a little faster. I picked out four distinct voices, two of those intermittent and unsteady. The men who had carried the coffin into the house, I presumed. None sounded enamored of their song.
The centipede crawled up on top of me. Several thousand chitinous claws scrabbled around on my face, tugging developing whiskers, getting into my nostrils and mouth, tasting like. . I don’t want to take my imagination there. I could conjure a thousand ugly ideas about where those claws had been.
The chanting circled the box.
The lid slid aside.
113
The centipede surged up and out, off my face, leaving a hundred stinging scratches. The chant ended; then stunned silence gave way to a weird, girly squeal that did not come out of the only girl in the room.
I surged up, right hand seizing the throat of an old goat with wild white hair and a repulsive growth on the front and top of his head. He wore one of the robes tailored at Flubber Ducky. The best of the bunch, I’m sure. He dropped a bronze sword. His eyes bugged. He tried to shake his head. “No!” I couldn’t tear my gaze away from that monster blemish, bigger than a pomegranate and the same color, with ample decorative liver spots.
I thought about Strafa and squeezed.
The centipede had one end each around the throats of two hired hands, the youngest and healthiest of the lot. They were outfitted with robes and swords, too. They wouldn’t have drawn a second glance on the street tonight. There were others, but most were barely breathing or were Mikon D. Stornes. Mikon hadn’t rated his own costume or sword, even incomplete.
He moved toward Kevans and Kip, who were laid out Mandela-style atop a plank table positioned at the heart of the most elaborate and colorful mystical diagram I’d ever seen. Kip was unconscious. Kevans was not. Magister Bezma had resisted villain stereotype enough not to have stripped her down before he got to work. She was sort of half-ass draped in one of the robes, though. Second best, probably. And a sword lay upon her chest, grip in her bound hands and tip between her knees. She got all loud again before I finished crawling out of the coffin. I hoped Mikon’s intentions were good. There wasn’t much I could do if he went bad on me before I finished with his cousin.
No worries needed, though.
The front door and surrounding wall exploded inward.
The Black Orchid emerged from the debris, very much meeting my inclination to see her as a death spirit. She was dreadful. She gave off her own dark glow and darker sparks. A stench preceded her. It would have been totally appropriate had she been sporting a jewelry ensemble made of rotting baby heads and severed penises.
The wall in the back blew in. Magister Bezma’s wards and alarms hadn’t been worth much. Moonblight and Moonslight arrived. Their blazing anger did not nourish the hope that flashed across my victim’s face. Moonslight was the more grim twin. She had a full charge of woman-scorned going on.
The house shook so violently that even the centipede lost its grip for an instant.
The blonde’s mighty companion dropped through the ceiling, like a stone falling from a great height. . Actually, he was standing on a pointed ton of stone, an inverted, stolen tombstone stele, having already penetrated the roof and several higher floors. He drove on down through the floor in this room, too, missing Kevans, Kip, and Mikon by inches, stopping hip deep in hardwood. Every waking eye looked his way. And the little blonde floated down through the opening that he had broken.
I got my grip back. Magister Bezma passed out from lack of air.
Morley, Singe, and Dollar Dan charged in through the breach opened by the Black Orchid.
Everybody looked at everybody. Only Kevans had anything to say, but plenty of that, loud, filthy, and virulent, until Moonblight extended a hand the way she had in front of my Macunado place, with similar advantage to the public peace-for maybe twenty seconds. Then something gave and Kevans started right up again.
Mikon fumbled at Kevans’s bonds, finished, turned to Kip. The liberated cords and gag went right onto Magister Bezma. The moment Meyness B. was sewed up I hied my handsome but worried butt over to Kip, who did not look good. He had an ugly blue-gray hue to him. “Somebody look at this kid and see what’s wrong with him.” I was talking to the twins, but the death master left Magister Bezma in response. She had Kip’s color coming back in seconds.
“You!” I told Kevans, finger stabbing. “Shut the hell up!” It was time. Her butt had been saved. She wasn’t required to fawn or be grateful, but she could cut back on the godsdamned complaining.
Teenage girls: got to sing, got to dance, got to whine about every damned thing. And I had another one, live-in, coming up.
“You,” I told Singe. “I don’t want to hear a word.”
She didn’t say anything, either, but I knew what she was thinking. I said, “Let’s get them together in one place,” like that really needed saying. The bad guys were crowded together already, now absent their bronze toad stickers. “And get their costumes. We can use those.” They were in no mood to resist, just standing, sitting, or lying there looking unhappy and hopeless. The one who did break for freedom smacked right into a combo mechanical and magical snare that, through absurd happenstance, hadn’t inconvenienced a single invader.
“Mariska, get that moron loose. Morley, let’s you and me and Mikon get the big fellow out of that hole.” He had begun struggling. That just got him more stuck. I met the little blonde’s gaze. She awarded me a very slight smile and a tiny nod of appreciation. In that moment she seemed more than a little familiar. But how?
The feeling that I should know her was stronger than the feeling with Hagekagome, which seemed mostly nostalgic.
Dollar Dan tied bad guys wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle with cord off a roll he found on steps leading to the second floor. That cord was the same as what had been used to bind Kevans and Kip. Kip was breathing better but sleeping. He must have been drugged to keep him pliable.
Dan made sure each healthy villain was tied between two who couldn’t get around under their own power, then put a dead guy at each end attached by a tangle that only a knife would ever defeat. The bad boys were not pleased to be at the mercy of the least of the Other Races. Only one commented, though. Tara Chayne fixed him up with a throat spell that worked better than had the one she’d wasted on the sorceress’s daughter.
Mud Man appeared up front. “Hey, we got it, Dan.”
“Good work.”
“It” was the wagon that Evil Lin had taken away, without the gray teamster. Dollar Dan had sent Mud Man to get it because he figured some of us might not be able to walk away from the scuffle.
Mud Man also announced, “There are tin whistles filtering into the neighborhood. They appear not to know what they are after, but they are looking for something.”
Dan told me, “We should finish here and leave before we find ourselves trapped in an interview that never ends.”
Tara Chayne grumbled, “Why the hell aren’t they off riding herd on the All-Souls revelries?”
The costume folks should be out by now, in the better-lighted parts of town, since no rain had yet materialized. Pickpockets and purse snatchers would be out with them. After the fireworks the drinking and rowdiness would really begin. If the red tops were serious, they would concentrate on keeping the worst incidents nonfatal, local, and unpopular.
Hell. General Block’s people would be doing that. Anyone filtering into this neighborhood would be up to something special. They would be Specials. It wouldn’t be smart to count on a friendly mind-set in Deal Relway’s Special fellows.
They might be under special instructions to make a special example of a certain special pain-in-the-ass-type professional snoop. They might make a special effort to catch said special guy in sufficiently special circumstances that his only way to weasel out w
ould be to claim special immunity as Prince Rupert’s personal special agent.
I said, “We maybe ought to consider getting out of here especially fast.”
Special minds were already thinking along those exact lines. John Stretch had his crew, including himself and Dollar Dan, gone in a trice-not just doing a fast rat scurry but getting out in front of the Specials with intent to provide mystery shadows for them to chase.
We finished tying Magister Bezma’s crew to one another. They stayed to greet the Specials. Bezma and Mikon went into the wagon along with still-sleeping Kip Prose, still-fuming Kevans Algarda, who had been tied up so long that her circulation wouldn’t let her get around under her own power, along with all the weapons and costumes originally intended for the Ritual. All four dogs found ways to climb in with the people.
They had kept a low profile during the excitement. They knew when it was best to stay out of the way.
Morley brought us down to earth, dispersing a growing communal urge to do something hasty and probably foolish. “With all the talent we have here, we should be able to leave without being seen as anything but some people headed for the celebrations.”
“Good thinking,” Tara Chayne opined, considering Morley with that speculative look that women get around him. “We have their costumes.”
Singe rolled her eyes, shook her head, and whispered, “Don’t get jealous.”
“Yeah? This could be fun.” Too bad Belinda wasn’t around to impress us with her lack of humor.
Then we were rolling with no ratfolk but Singe visible, nor any Black Orchid, nor even the little blonde’s big-ass friend. Nor the blonde herself, come to that. I hadn’t noticed Orchidia disappearing. I last saw her when she told me to take the gang to Shadowslinger’s place. Her turning into a ghost was a disappointment but no surprise. The blonde vanishing was a bigger disappointment. I’d been all set to get to know her better.
The big guy managing to vanish was more of an amazement.
I was sure I’d see them all again.