Circle of Enemies: A Twenty Palaces Novel

by Harry Connolly

  I scraped at the ground at the base of the gully, dragging my fingers through the loose and not-so-loose stones. Eventually I came to a piece of brick. I dug around it, exposing it and the two next to it. They had been broken at odd angles and fitted together …

  “Leave it,” Annalise said. “We have more important things.”

  I stood and brushed the dirt off my pants. “Are you sure it’s a circle, boss? It seems like a straight line to me.”

  “It’s some kind of closed shape,” she said. She held up the scrap of wood. “It has to be to do this.”

  We looked through the trees toward the single lonely light. It was about fifty yards away up the hill. Did Wally really make a circle this huge?

  “Boss, do you want me to destroy it?”

  “I told you to leave it. There’s no telling what he has trapped in here. Let’s go.”

  Talbot bent his knees to lower his center of gravity as he raised his weapon. I started back up the driveway, my grip on my ghost knife tight.

  After a few seconds, I heard Annalise say something to Talbot, and they both left the driveway, pushing through a stand of trees. I could hear their shoes quietly scraping on a wooden walkway.

  Sound traveled far at night. I kept moving toward the house, trying to empty my thoughts of everything except what I could see, hear, and smell. When my iron gate twinged at the bottom of the drive, I’d been sure a sorcerer of some kind lived here. I was less sure it was Wally; it would have been just like him to lead us here to collide with some jackass he didn’t like.

  But now that I’d crossed the circle—and knew what it could do—I felt more certain that this was Wally’s place after all. A huge buried circle a hundred yards across seemed like just the kind of crazy move he’d make. He was lazy and obsessive in nearly equal measures, and I believed a guy who would load himself with predators would set aside a private reserve for them, too.

  I was letting myself get distracted. I focused my attention outward. I didn’t see or hear anything unusual as I approached the house.

  He wasn’t here. The house was small, with a space beside it for a car and trees growing close behind it. The parking space was empty, and I couldn’t imagine Wally walking all the way here from the nearest ferry.

  The real question was whether he had left predators behind to guard the place or taken them all with him.

  And there was something else. During our little talk, Wally had said Don’t try that “turn over your books” crap with me, okay? It’s insulting. He’d said “books.” Plural. It had taken a while for me to realize what that meant, but I wasn’t here just to find him and pay him back. He had spell books, and spell books had to be destroyed.

  The cabin had wooden walls that had been painted the color of bricks. It was bigger than I’d expected. The outside light was a floodlight, one of the newer ones that use very little electricity but give off a thin, bluish light. It lit the front door and two windows. One of the windows was shuttered, and the other was boarded over.

  I almost knocked at the door, which was absurd. Instead, I held the gun so my index finger rested beside the trigger, then I pushed the corner of the ghost knife into the door between the knob and the jamb and slid it up and down.

  My spell cut through the door and locks as though they were made of smoke. I pressed gently on the wood, and it swung inward a couple of inches. The physical locks had been cut, but did Wally have magical protection, too?

  I forced myself to take a deep breath. Whatever was going to happen to me here would happen, and I’d live or I’d die, and there was nothing for me to do but get started.

  I pushed the door all the way open. The light from the security lamp showed no one else was in the room. I turned on a table lamp by the couch.

  The lamp was expensive, and so were the couch, table, and rug. I’d expected yard-sale furniture like the castoffs I had in my room, but the end table was made of solid dark wood. The couch was plump and new, and the rug was a mix of deep, beautiful colors. I supposed if I ever learned how to walk through walls the way Wally could, I’d have as much cash as I could carry.

  Sometimes an empty house feels empty. Everything seems inert, like a vacant tomb. But I couldn’t tell with Wally’s place. It didn’t feel empty or full; it was just a space.

  A quick scan of the room didn’t show any sigils or other signs of a spell. I kicked over the corner of the fancy rug, but it was just unmarked floorboards underneath.

  To the left I saw a doorway to a room with counters and a tiled floor. I went in. It was a small kitchen, but it wasn’t lacking for gear. It had a four-burner gas stove top and a full-sized fridge. I went through and opened another door to a little mudroom, complete with washer and dryer.

  The only other door here obviously led outside. I wasn’t ready to leave yet, but I did peek out the window. Having light sources close by made the darkness outside look like black paint on the glass. If Annalise and Talbot were out there, I couldn’t see them.

  On my way out of the kitchen, I opened the fridge. Part of me was convinced it would be full of human heads, but all I found were spoiled chicken parts and discolored steaks still in the packaging. The unit was just as cold as it should be; Wally hadn’t been here for a while. This was the second abandoned home in as many days, and it made me feel like I was in a race but so far behind the pack that I couldn’t see the other runners.

  I went back into the living room, and more details jumped out at me. There was no TV, but there was a stack of newspapers in the corner and a pile of magazines beside that. A small stack of mail sat on the table, but when I flipped through it, I didn’t see anything interesting. No brochures for Vegas hotels or train schedules, at least. It was all addressed to Wally King.

  I lifted a framed photo off the table. It showed Wally at about eighteen, wearing a life jacket and standing next to a wide stretch of white-water rapids somewhere. He was smiling and giving a thumbs-up, as though excited about his new adventure. There was no one else in the picture, and there were no other photos in the room—not family, not friends, nothing.

  In the back corner there was another doorway. It led to a short hallway with a door at the end and another just on my left. I figured the one on my left was a bathroom, and opening it proved me right. I looked around quickly but didn’t find anything unusual, unless you counted a bottle of Vicodin with no doctor or patient’s name on it, which I didn’t.

  When I put my hand on the knob of the other door, though, goose bumps ran up my arms and back. I’ve learned to trust those sudden intuitions, and I held both my weapons at the ready as I opened it.

  This was the bedroom, naturally. It was empty. I stood in the doorway, my heart pounding. No one was there. I flicked the light switch.

  The bulb in the center of the ceiling struggled to life. It barely lit the room. The dresser against the back wall was made of mahogany, and the sheets on the bed were satin. Between the dresser and the wall was a pair of sliding closet doors.

  I crossed the room to the dresser, hearing the floor creak under my feet. I took each drawer out of the dresser and dumped the contents onto the bed. All of his clothes were triple-X sweat suits in various colors, plus gray boxers and white socks. There was nothing else in the drawers or taped to the bottom. There was nothing in or under the bed, either.

  Then I opened the closet.

  The only thing hanging inside was a heavy winter coat. I took it off the hanger and tossed it onto the bed. I’d search the pockets, but that could wait.

  Because inside the empty closet, Wally had drawn something on the wall in black Sharpie. I couldn’t see the whole thing at once because the sliding doors blocked half the closet. Gripping the bottom of the door, I lifted it up and out like the door to a DeLorean until the wheels burst out of the tracks. Then I did it again, tossing both onto the bed.

  I squatted low, because the light was weak and I was throwing a shadow. “Well, well,” I said aloud. The sound of my own voice surprised
me.

  In the upper left corner of the closet was a drawing of the earth. There was a crude energy to it—it wasn’t pretty, but I could see Florida and the eastern edge of South America along one side of the circle. On the other, I could see West Africa and southern Europe. Two heavy black lines ran along the continents and oceans like cracks in an eggshell.

  To the right of that drawing and a little lower on the wall was a second drawing of the earth, but while the first was made by someone who couldn’t form a perfect freehand circle, this one was obviously meant to be bulging and malformed. Billows of steam shrouded most of the planet like a blanket of clouds, but something was just coming through them—something alive. Wally had drawn a single eye on a face that might have been liquid, or partially liquid, and in other places something else was rising out. Were they tentacles? The curves of a serpent?

  To the right of that drawing and still lower on the wall was a crude image of a city. In the foreground, people fled toward me, their arms over their heads in a stick-figure depiction of blind panic. In the background was a towering something—a thing so huge that the city skyscrapers looked like pencil stubs next to a grown man’s leg. I had the impression that it was dragging across the ground like a tongue licking a lollipop, and inside it I could see objects rising up: buildings, trees, and tiny screaming people.

  The last image was almost down at the carpet, and at first it was difficult to make out in the shadowy corner of the closet. I got onto my hands and knees to peer at it.

  The sun—our sun, presumably—was way down in the bottom right corner. There were a few broken specks to the left of that, and it took me a moment to realize that they must have been asteroids or loose rock. Maybe the broken pieces of the earth?

  On the left edge of this picture was a drawing of something obviously meant to be very much in the foreground. It was a ragged piece of something that was moving out of sight on the left, and all I could see was the rear part trailing behind like a corner of wet laundry. Inside it, as though trapped in an amoeba, were people, and they were screaming with all their might. I got the impression that they had been screaming for a long time, and would still be screaming an eternity from now.

  I took out the cell Annalise had left for me. I had to noodle with it a little, but eventually I figured out how to take a picture of all four pictures together, then I took a close-up of each one. What the hell. Someone might care.

  On the floor by this final sketch was an open book. It was a thin hardcover, one of those kids’ books that come in series with each featuring a different animal. This page showed a wasp laying eggs inside a caterpillar, and what I could read of the caption in the bad light said the eggs would hatch inside the living animal and begin to feed.

  There was a Post-it note sticking out of the book. Wally must have bookmarked a page. I grabbed the book off the floor and flipped through it.

  Immediately, the darkness began to deepen as though someone was dialing down a dimmer switch. At the same time, I heard a sound that was part hiss, part electrical crackle.

  Damn. When I’d moved the book, I’d uncovered a small sigil on the closet floor. Now, with the spell exposed, something around me was waking up.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I slapped the book back down over the sigil, covering it again. It didn’t work. The room kept getting darker, and the hissing grew louder.

  I swept the edge of my ghost knife through the sigil, cutting the spell in half. It came apart in a jet of black steam and iron-gray sparks—for all the good it did.

  The darkness started to feel solid, like a thickening gel. I put my back against the wall, desperately afraid of being trapped. A dark line hovered in the air in the center of the room, as though something I couldn’t see was blocking the light. It was dull black at the top and progressively lighter gray down toward the floor, and it was between me and the door. Things were getting darker every moment, and the line was moving slowly upward toward the bulb.

  Inside the line, something moved. Then, from the very darkest spot, an arm reached into the room.

  I squeezed off two shots at it, as much to sound the alarm for Annalise as to injure it. One of the bullets must have struck home, because the thing drew back.

  Incredible. A predator that could be hurt by a mundane weapon. I turned back to the wall and slashed my ghost knife through the plasterboard in one large circle. I shoved at it, trying to bull my way through, but the air was so thick I could barely use half my strength on it. I held my breath. Whatever this stuff was, I didn’t want it in my lungs. The darkness pressed against me; it had weight.

  Something suddenly clamped down on my right biceps. It looked like an eagle’s talon, but it was huge—easily bigger than my own hand—and it was mottled, greenish, and flaking. It squeezed, and the pressure was enormous.

  My ghost knife was trapped in my right hand. I placed the revolver against the thing’s wrist and fired off another shot. The sound of the gunshot near my face was like a whole new kind of punishment, and burning gunpowder struck my lips and ear.

  The bullet deflected off the thing’s bones, but not before tearing through its thin flesh. The pain must have startled it, because it released me. I pivoted into the corner of the closet. The room was still dim and gray at the edges, and I could see the talon where it had reached out of the darkness. I swung the ghost knife up at it, but my arm wouldn’t work right, and I struck it along one talon instead of straight through the leg.

  The end of the talon fell away, clunking onto the floor, and the crackling hiss turned into a sort of grinding shriek.

  The darkness was flowing around and against me now, and I could barely see. The weight of it held me against the wall and made it difficult to lift my arms. The section of the wall I’d cut burst with a loud crack, and I felt the darkness moving toward it like a current of water. I pushed toward it, almost blind now, desperate to get out into clean, breathable air. As it grew heavier, the shadow around me began to feel like worms crawling on my skin. The darkness was not an effect, like a squid’s ink cloud. It was part of this thing’s body.

  I grabbed the edge of the hole, but the plaster broke off in my hand. At that moment, I heard and felt the whole wall buckle outward. The predator, whatever it was, was entering our world, and it was too big to fit in Wally’s bedroom.

  I reached the hole in the wall just as a talon scraped along my back. I cried out; each talon was like a slashing knife, and I could feel the darkness inside my nose and sinuses, wriggling and alive. I shot at it again, but my grip was all wrong and the recoil knocked the gun out of my hand.

  Then I was through the hole, stumbling across the back of a toppled shelving unit and falling to my hands and knees. This predator had gotten inside me, and it hurt; I had to get outside. At least I’d be able to breathe out there, and run.

  A talon caught my right ankle. I spun immediately to swipe the ghost knife through its wrist, but it was so strong that it was already dragging me back. Fast, so fast—I knew I’d be pulled into that dark line before I could cut myself free.

  The back door burst open and Talbot charged in, revolver at the ready. I could barely see him through the gray, but I shouted: “It’s got me! Shoot it!”

  There was nothing to shoot, not really. There was only a hole in the wall and a growing shadow spreading through it, but Talbot aimed his weapon into the darkness and squeezed off five shots, handling the recoil better than I had, and sending each round at a slightly different angle.

  The talon released me after the third shot. “Let’s go!” I shouted. He pulled me through the door, my injured ankle banging painfully across the back of the metal shelves. I struggled to get my good left foot under me and hopped along beside him, fleeing the house as fast as I could.

  Annalise was running toward us. “Boss—” I yelled, but I didn’t get to finish because just then the washing machine smashed through the wall and flew by me like it had been flung by a tornado.

  Talbot jumped awa
y, even though it had already gone by. I lost my balance, stepped onto my injured foot, and fell.

  All the windows along the front burst outward, shutters and boards along with the glass. The whole cabin buckled out like an aboveground pool overfilled with water. I heard the groans of straining wood along with the bursts and cracks of breaking beams. The roof split and began to spread apart.

  Annalise plucked a green ribbon from her vest and threw it into the open doorway.

  At the same moment, that claw came rushing out of the darkness. The ribbon fluttered between the predator’s fingers and disappeared into the darkness. With her left hand, Annalise caught the middle of the creature’s three talons, holding it at arm’s length.

  But although she had the strength to hold the predator off, she didn’t have the mass. Her boots slid in the gravel as the thing pushed at her. The other talons tried to scrape at her.

  Green light flared inside the house. Annalise leaned back, pulling on the predator’s talon just as it tried to retreat. She braced against the crooked doorjamb with her right hand, holding the creature in place while the fire burned. The hissing crackle became a grinding shriek again, but this time it was three times as loud.

  The green light shone on her face, and I’ll never forget her expression. She was fierce and joyful, her eyes wide and wild, her teeth bared.

  Then the darkness spilling out of the doorway retreated back inside. The talon went limp in her hands, and the limb it was attached to dropped as though someone had let go of the other end. Annalise tossed the talon behind her without looking back, and it nearly landed on me. The thing had been burned off above the elbow. The talons twitched, scraping at the gravel, and for a moment I was sure it was going to start crawling at me, like a hand from an old horror movie.

  But it didn’t. Annalise walked into the house. The building groaned and shifted, but it didn’t collapse on her. Yet.

  I turned and saw Talbot standing at the edge of the gravel lot. He stared at the house—at us—in amazement, his mouth hanging open. If this was his first real experience with spells and predators, he was having pretty much the same reaction I’d had—stunned disbelief.