Unnatural Issue

by Mercedes Lackey

  “How long will it take, do you think?” Charles asked worriedly.

  He shook his head. “A week or two, at least. I have to contact my uncle first, then I’ll have to persuade her that this is the safest thing, then I’ll have to make arrangements. We can’t exactly bundle her into a basket and ship her off. She’ll need . . . good gad, almost everything. Wardrobe, since she can’t go haring off with nothing to wear but her uniforms, money, tickets . . . I’ll need to make sure Uncle Delacroix is available to fetch her right off the ship, because she hasn’t a word of French, so he will need to make arrangements at his end.”

  “Beastly complicated.” Charles shook his head. “Is she going to be all right traveling alone?”

  “She won’t be traveling alone,” Peter said firmly. “Garrick and I will take her as far as London. Peter Scott and Maya will see her onto the boat, and Scott will go with her on it. He’ll put her in my uncle’s hands. I don’t think you realize what a treasure she is. The Puck taught her the business of being a Land Ward.”

  Michael gave a low whistle. “Then she is, or will be, damned powerful.”

  “Is,” Peter replied firmly. “I say, who’s been teaching her? She just needs to know how to do things other than land-magic. Once she knows, it’s no odds, she gets them done. I wish I’d had more time with her. But uncle knows his business, and he speaks fluent English; he can take up where I left off.” Peter was very fond of his great-uncle, who would flirt outrageously with the English girl while at the same time making sure she knew she was absolutely safe with him. If she stayed with him for any length of time, she’d even get a certain amount of education outside of magic, and a bit of French polish. He hoped she would like it there.

  Would she get enough polish to fit into society at some level?

  Mind on your business, Peter.

  “Then once we’ve taken her father into custody . . .” Charles hesitated. “Then what?”

  “Then it’s in Alderscroft’s hands. He’ll have to find some way of confining the man, then faking his death.” Assuming we don’t kill him, taking him. He could see that thought in all of their faces, but they nodded. “One way or other, it will take some time before the estate gets settled on Susanne. Then she can come back here. At least then, she’ll have a means to support herself.”

  Mentally he sighed. He had no doubt that she was capable of running the small estate with the help of whoever her father’s legal man was and the servants. After all, Whitestone himself hadn’t exactly been managing his own property all these years, and she could hardly do worse with her land-sense.

  But even with French polish she wouldn’t fit into country “society.” London, yes, London society had room for all sorts of odd ducks if they had the blood and the money, but Earth Masters could not abide London. She’d probably confine herself to Whitestone Hall and the village and turn into a kind of lone eccentric, as so many Earth mages did, really being friendly only with animals and the Elementals. What a waste . . .

  He shook off his melancholy thoughts. No time for that sort of speculation. “Right,” he said. “Now, about the defenses. You have me here now, too. What can I do?”

  14

  JUNE was half spent, and all of Richard’s plans for bringing Rebecca back on Midsummer Night had long since fallen by the wayside. His best hope at this point was for Hallowmass Night. Now . . . on the one hand that was a better time for the ceremony. The barriers between the Spirit World and the Material World were thinner. Spirits traditionally crossed over then. It would be easier to force the girl’s soul out and easier to bring Rebecca across.

  But he didn’t want to wait. He’d been delayed long enough. He wanted his property back.

  And, at length, the fellow that the housekeeper had hired came back with the word he had long been waiting for.

  Word that only brought more complications with it.

  Richard brooded over the report. The man was surprisingly literate. He had expected some sort of thug, but the fellow could actually write a coherent sentence. The problem lay in what those sentences said.

  Unlike Richard, the man had not supposed that Susanne had stayed on the roads. He had assumed she would trudge off like a man who was running away and didn’t want to be followed. He wrote that he had been sure she would move in a straight line, going across the moors. And he had been right.

  She was currently employed (as he had suspected) as a dairymaid.

  At Branwell Hall. By the Kerridges. Who were, if not Earth Masters, certainly Earth mages. Of course, the detective had not known that; he had only known that she had been taken on at the dairy, she was doing satisfactory work, and had fitted in. He had concluded his report with the words, “If I may be so bold, sir, if the goal is to be assured that the girl in question is well set up and taken care of, she seems to have as secure a position as any serving girl in England. The Kerridge family is well thought of hereabouts, and places with them are greatly coveted. Now that you know her whereabouts, I should leave her in place, and consider my duty by her to be done.”

  Well, yes. That would have been true, had the situation been as he described.

  The Kerridges . . . this put a different complexion on the situation entirely. Most of the tenants and servants on the estate had at least a touch of magic about them. They had many friends and allies. They were part of Alderscroft’s White Lodge and the network of informants associated with the Lodge.

  And he didn’t know what, if anything, Susanne had told them. It certainly would have sounded utterly absurd for her to complain of being treated too well! If she had fled only because she was uncomfortable in the position as gentry, it was unlikely she would say anything at all.

  But if she had noticed anything amiss . . .

  Well, that could make things difficult.

  She seemed to be there in the capacity of a servant, which suggested that she hadn’t told anyone anything. It would be his word against hers; he could say she was actually a runaway servant, he could repeat the story he had given the detective, or he could tell the truth, that she was his daughter and he didn’t know why she had run away, but she obviously was not thinking clearly.

  Except . . .

  Except that these were the Kerridges. And they were magicians. They knew him, or at least, Michael did. They knew how he had acted, these past twenty years. And they were, almost certainly, going to detect the “scent” of necromancy on him. If they didn’t, their Elemental allies would, and would tell the human mages instantly.

  He dared not set foot in person anywhere near Branwell Hall.

  Nor could he send an agent after her. Since it was the Kerridges, they would not accept an agent’s word that she was a runaway servant, and they would probably put up a fight over letting her go, and at that point she would tell them who she really was. Then of course, there would be questions he could not answer—such as, why was he claiming she was just a servant? And why hadn’t he come in person?

  If he sent an agent after her as his daughter, who would he send? Again, the question would be, why had he not come in person? He could plead that he never left the house anymore, but Michael Kerridge knew him and would insist. With cursed good intentions they would want to interfere, insist that it would be good for him, insist on playing intermediary between him and Susanne, and of course . . . he would be found out.

  And once they uncovered that Susanne was his daughter, however it happened, they would immediately see her powerful resemblance to Rebecca.

  Once they added that resemblance to the signs of necromancy, they would know exactly what he had planned. No, this was an impossible situation.

  He couldn’t have a troll quietly kidnap the wench, Branwell Hall was too well-defended. He very much doubted that a single troll could even get on the grounds.

  And he wasn’t going to give up.

  That left only one solution. An all-out assault.

  They wouldn’t know it was him. He could make sure his flunkies took as ma
ny of the servant girls as they could snatch once they got Susanne. The extras could serve as their reward. The Kerridges would have no idea who was behind the attack, and he could keep Susanne safely hidden until he could make the spirit transfer. And once that was done, he could take Rebecca out of the country before the attack could be traced back to him.

  It wasn’t the best plan, but right now, it looked like the only plan.

  There was only one bright spot. He could finally make those wretched servants of his into something less interfering and more useful. After all, when this was done, he would need the kind of cooperation from them he wasn’t going to get from those with minds of their own.

  It had been several days since that meeting in Charles’ office. Peter was still trying to convince Susanne that she needed to go to France. He hadn’t managed yet, and the honest reason was she was more afraid of being in a foreign country than she was of her father. He could understand that, actually, but the truth of the matter was they couldn’t exactly, as he had said, bundle her into a basket and ship her off. She had to consent to it. It frustrated him no end, but he could understand it.

  Alderscroft had responded immediately, via telegram and Peter Scott, then via a longer letter detailing what he was doing. He was not taking this lightly, as well he should not. He had alerted the rest of the White Lodge, who were spreading the word to magicians who were not Masters. He promised reinforcements, so that a Hunting Party could be mounted in force, but he warned that they could not come sooner than a fortnight. That was understandable; the situation with Germany probably meant that many of the Masters were engaged with what was happening on the Continent.

  Nevertheless, Peter was worried. He had heard a rumor that he couldn’t trace that someone had been showing her picture about down in the village. Of course, it wouldn’t have been her picture, it would have been her mother’s, but if the resemblance was as strong as Michael Kerridge said, that would have been enough for her to be identified.

  Now, no one in the village had ever seen her, but enough of the Branwell servants came down to the pub for a drink now and then that one of them, in all innocence, could have identified her.

  So he was not relaxing his vigilance. Not until they got her safely accross the Channel and into France.

  Which, as it turned out, was just as well.

  He and Garrick were still staying at the gamekeeper’s cottage. He liked it, and there seemed no reason to move out at this stage. He and Garrick could still go down to the pub in their guise as the gamekeeper and his brother and collect little tidbits of information.

  And it didn’t hurt at all that they were well outside the bounds of the Hall proper. His Elementals were always close at hand, and it was much easier to tell what was going on at the borders of Branwell lands. So he was the first to know that something was wrong.

  It was just after dusk, and he was on the path from the cottage to the Hall, when he got an unsettled, queasy feeling in his stomach. He would have put it down to something he had eaten, except that a moment later, a dozen fauns, all with expressions of panic on their faces, came leaping out of the forest, heading for the Hall.

  And right behind them were other Elemental creatures, all running as if for their lives.

  The cottage wasn’t that far; he doubled back to it, to find Garrick already outside, with the special guns, a pair of shotguns with shells loaded with blessed salt. He took one, Garrick took the other, and they started off in the direction that the Elementals had been fleeing from.

  They had not gotten more than a hundred yards when they were joined by Charles and Michael, both on horseback with similar weapons slung over their shoulders and gamebags of shells slung over their backs. The two Kerridge men dismounted when they spotted Peter and Garrick and sent their mounts back to the stables with slaps on their haunches. An Earth mage could always command an animal to do what he wanted; Peter wished he had a power that convenient.

  “Elizabeth has Susanne,” Michael told them. “She’s organizing the second line of defense at the Hall.”

  Peter nodded. There seemed nothing more to say at that point. They continued to move in the direction from which things were running. It wasn’t just Elementals now, it was ordinary animals and birds, too.

  “I suppose we should count our blessings that he didn’t wait until full dark,” Peter said, squinting, as he tried to make out anything in the twilight gloom under the trees.

  “He’ll have to come at us over the boundary,” Michael replied. “Charles and several of the stronger servants and I revived all the old protections out there. It won’t be enough to stop him, but it will prevent him from conjuring anything up inside our boundary.”

  “That’s—”

  They were near the wall now, and suddenly they were hit by a wave of ghastly stench born on an icy wind.

  Garrick retched. Charles and Michael clasped a hand over their mouths.

  “Dear God in heaven—” Michael said, muffled by his hand. He didn’t have to ask “What is that?” because he knew, as did Peter. They had both dealt with necromancers. and they knew exactly what it was.

  There was a clear stretch between the wall and the forest, and there was just enough light for them to see vague figures clambering over it and dropping down on their side. Peter was quite glad that the figures were vague. He didn’t really want to see them, given the stink. It wasn’t just his stomach that was in revolt; his whole body shuddered with revulsion. The magic that animated these things was utterly and completely wrong on the bone-deep level. It was antilife in every possible way, and instinct cried out against it.

  With a single mind, they stopped where they were, put their guns to their shoulders, and fired on the things moving toward them.

  Normally a shotgun blast at this distance would do little or nothing to a reanimated corpse—which was, of course, what these things were. But their loads were made of blessed salt, and all it took was a grain of that to penetrate the flesh of one of these things in order to drop them in their tracks. The blessed salt dissolved the binding, freeing the trapped spirit from the flesh.

  The front line of the things dropped, but more kept coming from behind. They didn’t move fast—they couldn’t—but they were inexorable. As the Zulu wars had proved, you didn’t have to have superior weapons to overwhelm those who did; you just had to have enough soldiers to engulf them.

  They opened up with the second chambers.

  The next line dropped.

  “Stagger the loads!” Peter shouted as he slipped new shells into the chambers. “Kerridges, then us!”

  The Kerridges’ guns roared while he was still reloading. He had counted on that. The Kerridges hunted far more than he and Garrick did, and they would be able to load faster. Two firing while two reloaded meant they would minimize their vulnerability.

  But there were more things behind the walking dead that were not as vulnerable to the blessed salt.

  Over the top of the wall tumbled three enormous, blobby things that Peter was just as glad he couldn’t see, as well as a swarm of things that were little more than motion in the growing darkness. Then came more of the reanimated dead, some skeletal, some substantial. The stench had become a force all its own.

  Trolls and hobgoblins and boggarts . . .

  Then the last part of the attacking force rose over the top of the wall. Transparent, glowing in a sickly green or pallid blue, there was no mistaking them for anything living. They wore the tattered shreds of the clothing of varied eras, and they weren’t all whole. Plenty of them were missing pieces of themselves—arms, heads, legs. The oldest were dressed in quite antique costumes indeed, the youngest in the usual smock of a country farmer or the suit of a town dweller. These were revenants, those spirits that actually tried to manifest enough to be actual haunts. Strangely, there were few women among them. Or perhaps not so strangely; these were, after all, the creatures bound by Richard Whitestone, who had already proven himself a misogynist.

 
; They seethed and surged against an invisible barrier above the wall; being pure spirit, they couldn’t force themselves through the protections around Branwell the way that the physical creatures could. But their mere presence was more than enough to inspire a healthy dose of terror. And Peter knew that if they did force their way across, they were perfectly capable of tearing the flesh of a human to shreds.

  Revenants.

  Revenants were a necromancer’s stock-in-trade. Many were little more than unthinking rage, and it was easy for a necromancer to turn that rage against any target he chose. Even one could sicken and injure, and they could certainly weaken and terrify the living enough to allow the walking dead to overwhelm them. A swarm like this could be as deadly as gunfire.

  Michael and Charles had changed to another set of loads, this lot made of lead from a church roof. Peter remembered how Michael had gotten it—by the simple expedient of replacing an entire roof on the excuse of “charity” and claiming the salvaged roof slabs as they were replaced. The lead shot was taking care of the boggarts, and making the trolls howl with pain. But this was an army, and no mistake, and without an army of their own, they couldn’t hold out for much longer.

  “Water Master! Water Master!”

  He dared to glance in the direction the call was coming from. He saw undines waving frantically at him—from where? He called up a mental map of this part of the estate—

  There was a brook there! And anyplace there was water, Water Elementals could go! There’re my allies! Water could be an antagonist of Earth as well as an ally, and it was quite clear from where he stood that the undines were prepared to fight for him and for Branwell.

  “Retreat toward the brook to my left!” he shouted over the roar of the guns; he sensed Michael nodding rather than saw it, and they began the step by step retreat toward the water.