All too soon, slowly but inevitably the strikers began to give ground, the rage and desperation in their hearts no match for an army of well-trained, well-armed fighters. The Guards’ swords and axes rose and fell with methodical brutality as they moved slowly forward, foot by foot, hacking and thrusting, shoulder to shoulder now as they imposed shape and meaning on the battle. They beat and drove the strikers back, and Hawk and Fisher were right there with them. Individual strikers fell wounded, or were separated from their fellows, and some Guards took the opportunity to take out their anger on those defenseless unfortunates. Hawk saw a constable cut down a man armed only with the splintered remains of a wooden club, and then all the Guards nearby moved in to kick the man to death.
The strikers broke, and turned and ran, and the Guards ran after them, bloodlust thrumming in their heads. They cut down men and women from behind, and laughed as they did it. The battle was over, but the violence had its own impetus now, and would not be denied. Hawk saw one Guard corner a lone woman striker against a wall. She was visibly pregnant, driven to fight by desperation and need, her swelling belly in contrast to her undernourished frame. She had two knitting needles in her hands, the wood roughly sharpened into points. She quickly realized there was nowhere for her to run, and she dropped the needles and showed the Guard her empty hands, but he didn’t care. He was breathing hard, and grinning, and his eyes were very bright. He put away his sword and drew his nightstick from his belt, and struck her across the swollen belly. She cried out, thrown back against the wall behind her, and he hit her across the belly again. His soft laughter was drowned out by her screams as he drew back his arm to hit her again.
Hawk threw himself on the Guard. He grabbed the man, swung him around, and hit him in the face with all his strength. The Guard’s mouth and nose exploded in a cloud of blood. He would have fallen, but Hawk grabbed him by the tunic front and held him up. He put away his axe, and coldly and methodically he set about beating the Guard to death with his bare hands. The Guard struggled at first, and then he screamed, but Hawk didn’t care. In the end, Fisher had to drag Hawk off the man by brute force. He was breathing hard, and didn’t seem to recognize her for a moment. The Guard lay unmoving on the ground, a bloody mess but still alive. The pregnant woman had disappeared. Fisher looked quickly around to see if anyone had noticed, but the other Guards were still pursuing the retreating strikers. Which was just as well. Fisher was sure none of the other Guards would have understood. Hawk looked at the blood on his hands, as though unsure as to how it got there.
“It’s over, Hawk,” said Fisher. “The others can deal with the mopping up. Let’s get out of here.”
“This is Haven,” said Hawk, too tired even to be bitter. “Everywhere is just like this.”
And that was when everything really went to hell.
The zombies suddenly went insane, abandoning their tasks to attack every living thing in sight. They swarmed off the ships and along the harborside, unliving arms wielding steel hooks and crowbars, and threw themselves on Guards and strikers alike. Those without weapons tore at the living with savage teeth and clawed hands. There were hundreds of them, more than a match for the Guards and the strikers put together, and the living were already exhausted from the earlier fighting. The zombies tore a bloody path through them, hitting the living from all sides, and the remaining Guards and strikers quickly forgot their differences in the name of survival. People who’d been trying to kill each other only moments before now stood shoulder to shoulder and back to back in the face of a far more terrible enemy.
The zombies fell on the living with silent fury, tearing warm flesh with cold hands, wielding their improvised weapons with unnatural strength. Men and women fell howling as the dead bludgeoned them to the bloody ground, and tore them to pieces. The Guards and the strikers fought back as best they could, but what would normally have been deadly blows had no effect on zombies. Cutting off or destroying the head effectively blinded them, but the bodies still fought on, clawed hands reaching out for the warmth of living flesh. Complete dismemberment was the only way to really stop a zombie, and in the press of stamping, shrieking bodies, that was hard and dangerous work. Everywhere men and women screamed in horror as the dead dragged them down, cold hands tearing horrid furrows in yielding flesh. But neither the Guards nor the strikers made any attempt to turn and run. They stood their ground and fought back with grim determination. They all knew that only they stood between the suddenly murderous zombies and the defenseless family homes beyond the docks. If the zombies broke through, and on into the Devil’s Hook and beyond, the dead would turn the crowded tenements into one great slaughterhouse.
Hawk and Fisher fought side by side, cutting down any zombie that came near them. Hawk’s axe was proof against some magics, and he quickly discovered that a blow from his axe could at least briefly interrupt the magic animating the dead. He sent the zombies crashing to the ground again and again, and Fisher would then move in and dismember the zombie with her sword before it could rise again. It was hard, butcher’s work, and there seemed no end to it. Hawk and Fisher fought on, fatigue building in their aching arms and backs as they swung their weapons over and over. Undead faces glared at them from every side, teeth snapping like traps in rotting faces. The recently killed rose up again, all along the harborside, and the line between the raging dead and the helpless families of the Hook grew steadily thinner.
And then the mists along the harborside suddenly came alive, twisting and snapping, and became thick purposeful strands that enveloped the zombies and tore them apart. The sorceress Mistique had finally arrived. She stood at the edge of the fighting, and beckoned desperately to Hawk and Fisher. The zombies struggled against the attacking mists, ignoring Hawk and Fisher as they fought their way through the undead ranks to join Mistique. The sorceress’s face was pale and strained as she struggled to control so large an area of mists.
“A rogue sorcerer’s taken over control of the zombies!” she said breathlessly as Hawk and Fisher joined her. “He’s overridden the DeWitts’ control. Which means he’s got to be somewhere nearby. And bloody powerful. No one I know in the city at present could do anything like this.”
“Can you locate him?”
“I’m trying! It’s taking practically everything I’ve got to take on so many zombies with my mist. I can’t maintain this for long.” She was breathing hard now, sweat beading on her face. Around them, the Guards and the strikers were attacking the beleaguered zombies with renewed strength and purpose, but already some of the dead were breaking free of the mists, as Mistique’s concentration wavered. Her hands became white-knuckled fists as she fought for control. “He has to be somewhere near. … Someone so powerful should be easy to detect, but … I can’t see him! He must be hiding behind some kind of shield. … Wait a minute. If he’s shielded, look for no magic where there should be some. Got him! Shit! He’s hidden himself in the DeWitts’ business offices! You two go and get him; I’ll stay here and hold the zombies with my mists for as long as I can.”
“You’re the sorceress,” said Hawk. “Shouldn’t you—”
“I’m needed here! Move, damn you! I can’t control so much mist for long!”
Hawk and Fisher ran back down the harborside, heading for the DeWitts’ business offices. They were already deadly tired, but they forced themselves on, pushing the pace as much as they could. The sounds of fighting continued behind them.
“Just the two of us, against a powerful sorcerer,” said Fisher. “Not good odds.”
“They never are,” said Hawk. “I wish we still had those magic suppressor stones we were issued a while back.”
“You mean the ones with a tendency to blow the hand off your wrist if you held on to them too long?” said Fisher.
Hawk sniffed, and looked back to see how Mistique was doing. Mists boiled around the sorceress, ripping limbs from any zombie that got too close to her, but just as Hawk looked, one of the living dead came up on her blind side,
its clawed hand reaching for the back of her head. Hawk started to cry out a warning, and then the zombie’s hand closed on Mistique’s thick black hair, and ripped it away. The whole great black mane of hair came away in his hand, revealing a shiny bald head underneath it. The dead man looked at it, puzzled, as Mistique howled with outrage. Her mists streamed into the zombie’s mouth, shot down into his body, and then blew him apart from the inside. Hawk and Fisher looked at each other as they ran.
“I didn’t know she wore a wig,” said Hawk. “Did you know she wore a wig?”
“Shut up and keep running,” said Fisher.
“Been a real day of surprises today,” said Hawk, and then he shut up and saved what was left of his breath for running.
They were soon pounding into the cobbled yard before the DeWitts’ place of business. There were lights in all the windows, but no trace of anyone anywhere. Hawk yelled for the DeWitts to show themselves, but there was no response. Even the private guards in their stupid uniforms were conspicuous by their absence. Hawk and Fisher hefted their weapons and moved cautiously forward. The front door stood slightly ajar. Hawk pushed it slowly open with one hand, tense for any response, but all was still and quiet. Hawk pushed the door all the way open, and he and Fisher charged forward into the hall beyond.
What remained of the the DeWitts’ personal guard lay scattered the length of the hall. They lay still where they had fallen, eyes staring unseeingly, their weapons mostly still undrawn. Whatever had killed them had hit them hard and suddenly, and now they just cluttered the hall. Fisher knelt and examined a few, and then shook her head.
“No obvious wounds. No discoloration to the face, so probably not poison. Something just … sucked all the life right out of them. Our sorcerer’s been busy.”
“Maybe he’s using their life force to maintain his control over the zombies,” said Hawk, looking quickly about him. “If so, then the odds are that everyone else here is dead, too. I suppose it’s too much to hope that he got the DeWitts.”
“Concentrate on the business at hand,” Fisher said sharply. “If this sorcerer is as powerful as Mistique thinks, there could be all kinds of defensive spells between us and him.”
“Right,” said Hawk. “And one’ll get you ten he already knows we’re here.”
They moved cautiously forward down the hall, stepping carefully over the dead bodies, weapons at the ready, but nothing and no one emerged from the shadows to meet them. The silence was absolute, apart from Hawk’s and Fisher’s strained breathing. They checked each room leading off the hall, but they found no defensive magics, no creatures appearing out of midair, no elementals descending suddenly upon them from the spirit realms. Only more dead, struck down wherever they happened to be when the sorcerer cast his deadly spell.
Hawk and Fisher ascended the great stairway at the end of the hall, the backs of their necks tingling in anticipation of the attack they’d probably never know till it hit them. They stopped at the top of the stairs and looked about them. Closed doors and unmoving shadows looked calmly back at them. Fisher hefted her sword unhappily.
“This is wrong,” she said softly. “There should be all kinds of nasty surprises protecting a sorcerer this powerful.”
“Unless he isn’t really all that powerful,” said Hawk, just as quietly. “And it’s taking everything he’s got just to keep his zombie spell going.”
“In which case,” said Fisher, “I vote for charging right in and killing the bastard before he realizes what’s happening.”
Hawk looked at her fondly. “That’s what you always suggest.”
“Yeah—and most of the time it works.”
“Can’t argue with that. All right, we listen at each door until we hear something magical, then we burst in and I’ll race you to see who gets to him first.”
“Go for it,” said Fisher.
They padded cautiously down the landing, listening carefully at each closed door. Their soft footsteps sounded dangerously loud in the quiet, but no one came out to investigate. And finally, at the third door, they heard a voice droning quietly. Hawk and Fisher shared a quick look and a nod. Hawk lifted his axe, but Fisher stayed him with a raised hand. She tried the door handle, and it turned easily. Fisher turned the handle as far as it would go, and then eased the door inward an inch. The hinges were mercifully silent. The air was sharp with tension, like the sea just before a storm breaks. Hawk counted down from three with his fingers, and then hit the door with his shoulder. The door flew open, and Hawk and Fisher charged into the room, weapons raised. Only to crash to a sudden halt as they saw who was waiting for them.
The sorcerer was sitting cross-legged in midair, floating unsupported above a wide chalk-drawn pentacle on the bare wooden floor. Dressed in sorcerer’s black, he wore robes hung loosely about a lean, almost emaciated frame. His shoulders were still broad, but his large hands were just bone and skin, and they wavered unsteadily as they moved in slow mystical passes. The dark robes were stained and shabby, nowhere near as impressive as they had once been. The same could also be said of the sorcerer. His pale aquiline features were drawn and strained, and the dark, deep-set eyes were almost feverishly bright. He no longer shaved his head, and his hair had grown back in a dirty gray.
He turned his head slowly to look at Hawk and Fisher, his thin mouth moving in something that might have been meant as a smile. Hawk’s first thought was that the sorcerer looked like a drug addict too long from his last fix. Squatting on the sorcerer’s left shoulder was a small bloodred demon, barely a foot high, with a pinched vicious face and flaring membranous wings. It hissed at Hawk and Fisher, then giggled nastily. A long, slender umbilical cord ran from the demon’s swollen belly to the sorcerer’s neck, where it plugged seamlessly into the prominent artery.
“Hello, Hawk, Fisher,” said the sorcerer in an almost normal voice. “I knew it would be you who found me, if anyone.”
“Hello, Gaunt,” said Hawk, not lowering his axe. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”
The sorcerer Gaunt had once single-handedly cleaned up the Devil’s Hook, killing all the villains, and made the place almost civilized for a while. But it all fell apart again after he was forced to leave Haven. A good man in a bad city, he’d drawn his considerable power from a succubus, a female demon he’d called up out of the Pit, and bound to him, at the cost of his soul. He’d used evil to enable him to do good, and had no right to be surprised when it all went horribly wrong. The succubus was destroyed, and Gaunt lost his power source. Hawk and Fisher saw it happen. Gaunt had been their friend, then.
“Jesus, Gaunt,” said Fisher. “What the hell happened to you? And what the hell do you think you’re doing now?”
“What I have to,” said Gaunt.
“You look half dead,” said Hawk. “And what is that ugly thing squatting on your shoulder?”
“My new source of power,” said the sorcerer. His voice was calm, almost emotionless. “After I lost my lovely angel, my succubus, most of my magic went with her. I couldn’t protect the Hook anymore, and all the scum I’d kept out came rushing back, wolves with endless appetites returned to prey on the innocent. So I left Haven, in search of new magic. But after what happened to the succubus, the only demons that would answer my call were nasty little shits like this one. It’s really no more than a parasite, feeding me magic in return for the life force it drains from me. Not the best of bargains to enter into, but I didn’t have much of a choice.”
“From what I remember of your succubus,” said Hawk, “you’ve just traded one addiction for another.”
The demon glared at Hawk, stretching its mouth impossibly wide to show sharp steel teeth. Up close it looked like a living cancer, bulging red and traced with purple veins, and it stank of sulphur and the Pit.
Gaunt smiled sadly at Hawk. “In the end, power is all that matters. It’s all I have left. You want to know how I could do something like this to myself, don’t you? Ah, Hawk, I was already damned long before you met me. That’
s the price you pay for bargaining with the Pit, no matter how noble your intentions. Trafficking with demons like this was no trouble at all to what’s left of my conscience. I needed powerful magic again, to do what had to be done, to save the Hook. I failed them, you see. I promised them they’d be safe, promised I’d protect them from the bastards who used and preyed on them, but in the end I couldn’t back it up. Now I can. I have returned, and this time I will clean up the docks and the Devil’s Hook for good. The dead shall be my soldiers, and no one will be able to stand against them. I will spread such horror through the city that no one will ever dare oppose my will again.”
“Your zombies are killing innocent people right now!” said Fisher. “Guards and striking dockers, men and women putting their lives on the line to protect their families. Or are you saying you can prevent the zombies from slaughtering defenseless people in the Hook?”
“No,” said Gaunt. “Some of the innocent always have to die, for the greater good.”
“They’re killing everything that moves!” said Hawk. “You don’t have any real control over them!”
“You’re wrong, Hawk! Wrong! I planned this all very carefully. I created the zombie control device, with a little help from my friend, and I sold it to the DeWitts. Suitably disguised, of course—they didn’t know it was me. But I knew they’d never be able to resist such an opportunity. And all along, the control device had my spell hidden at its heart, so I could override the DeWitts’ control at any time. I knew Marcus and David would be too greedy to look beyond the profits to be made, by replacing living workers with zombies. And that greed has brought their doom upon them.”
Beyond the Blue Moon (Forest Kingdom Novels) Page 6