The Banshee's Walk

by Frank Tuttle

  “Thank you. When and if the time comes, I’ll take you up on that.”

  “Marlo.” And they were off.

  I could feel eyes on us. And feel their intent. The ghost of the huldra chose that moment to intrude. It babbled on in words I didn’t know but in tones that were unmistakable – they seek to do you harm, so do them harm first. And it tried to show me ways to do just that, by coupling strange words with shapes traced in the dark.

  I cussed aloud. Evis titled his head.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  And at that moment, I heard, from out on the lawn, the shouted word “throw.”

  Thunk, as a rope was cut. A rush of wind, the agonized shrieking of timbers moving against each other, and then the ground-shaking thump as the throwing arm slammed into the stop and the contents of the basket were hurled toward us.

  I dived for the floor, reached up to pull Evis down with me, grabbed only empty air.

  The projectile struck.

  The House shook. Stones broke. Timbers twisted and tore. Plaster sprang from the walls, clattering to the floor in hand-sized chunks, which then in turn shattered and skidded. Bits of the ceiling rained down, peppering my back and neck like a sudden hard rain.

  Shouts rang out, and screams. Great rolling clouds of dust boiled down the hall.

  Another impact, this one from the rear of the House, sounded. Plaster fell. I heard a monstrous shifting, as though a great mass of stone moved against another.

  Evis hauled me to my feet. “Time to go,” he said, and when he set me down my feet were on the stairs.

  We charged up them, through the dust. The shouting behind us grew closer and took on a decidedly determined tone.

  I didn’t need any exhortation to hurry. Evis glided on ahead, cloak flapping, silver blade gleaming in his hand.

  “There he is!”

  I risked a glance backwards. A dozen of the Lady’s staff took to the stairs after me. There was no mercy in their eyes.

  A pair of dark shapes leaped over me. They fell into the mob. Bodies flew. It was over in a pair of heartbeats, and the stairs were littered with groaning forms who puked and bled but nevertheless made a decent show of crawling downward and away.

  Sara and Victor rose from the dust. “We made every effort to spare their lives,” said Victor. “I shall show no such restraint again.”

  The hulda howled and called out for blood. I turned from the halfdead and followed Evis up the stairs.

  We made it inside. The catapult crews shouted and cussed, preparing their engines for another round of mayhem.

  Mama was at the hole by the window. “I figure these here walls are tougher than anybody knew,” she announced. “Still, two more throws from each, and they’ll be a knocking on yonder door. And that’s if the floor don’t cave in first.”

  Darla was whispering with Evis. I didn’t need to guess about what.

  “Boss.” Gertriss was eyeing me funny. “Boss, what have you been up to?”

  Mama turned from her surveillance of the lawn and fixed her eyes upon me as well.

  “There may be another option,” I said. “Hisvin and the people outside aren’t the only magical types involved.”

  Darla came to my side. “What were you thinking?” she said. She ran her fingers through my hair, turned my face to hers, looked at me as if she were trying to stare inside my skull. “Are you crazy, Markhat? You don’t know what’s down there, what it might do.”

  “Nobody does, oh light of my life. That’s one thing we’ve all got in common. But we’ve got something neither the Corpsemaster nor the spooks outside have got.”

  Buttercup ran up to me as if summoned. I tousled her hair, and she squealed and smiled.

  “Evis said—”

  “I know what Evis said. And I appreciate it. I’m not saying we start propping up paintings and opening doors just yet. I’m just saying it’s another place to run, if all else fails. I haven’t counted the Corpsemaster out just yet.”

  Mama came stomping up. Evis took her place at the spy-hole.

  “Boy, you got less sense than any man I ever met. Hold this.” She stuck a dead robin in my hand.

  “Mama.”

  “Shut up. Gertriss. Take his other hand. Look.”

  Gertriss took my free hand, shrugged apologetically, and closed her eyes.

  Mama mumbled something too soft for me to catch.

  Shivers ran up my spine.

  “Oh my,” said Evis. “The Corpsemaster. I do believe you’ll want to see this, Markhat.”

  We could all hear renewed shouting from outside. The telltale clinks of metal on metal joined them, and the hiss and thunk of arrows and bolts.

  I tried to tear free, but Gertriss held fast.

  “Still, boy, be still,” hissed Mama. She shook an owl at me with her free hand. Gertriss pawed at the air with hers.

  “Something done touched you, boy,” said Mama. “You see it, girl?”

  “I see,” replied Gertriss. Her eyes didn’t open. “Something old. Something that’s been buried.”

  “Buried but not dead,” said Mama. “Restless in a tomb.”

  I yanked my hands free. “We don’t have time, ladies,” I said. “What’s happening out there?”

  “Men. Lots of them. They’ve just come walking out of the woods.” I couldn’t see Evis’s face, but I could hear the puzzlement in his voice. “They’ve attacked the catapult crews.”

  “Are they winning?”

  “Depends on your point of view.”

  “Evis. Now is not a good time for cryptic.”

  “They’re taking arrows and bolts by the dozen. Aside from one having his legs hacked off, they’re still coming.”

  “What?”

  “They’re getting slaughtered, Markhat. But they’re not dying. Or at least they’re not falling down like polite dead men tend to do.”

  A flash so bright it lit up Evis in silhouette shone outside. He leaped back from the spy-hole, blinking and cussing.

  “The cylinders,” he said, before I could ask. “Lit up. Like magelamps, but brighter.” He waved his hands in front of his face. “I hope this isn’t permanent.”

  “Was that Hisvin too?”

  Evis shrugged, still blind. “No idea.”

  Screams rose up from outside.

  Screams, and a wind. It built and rose and whipped and howled. It switched directions, it beat against the wounded House with fists of debris.

  The walls shook. The floor beneath groaned as timbers shifted.

  Buttercup dropped her dolls, stood and opened her mouth to howl.

  Mama waddled forward and stuffed a huge chunk of taffy candy right into Buttercup’s mouth.

  The banshee tried to spit it out, but Mama held her lips shut, and within a moment Buttercup was smiling and chewing and beaming up at Mama.

  The wind intensified. Softer, wetter thuds joined the sharper pelting of rocks on the walls, and I realized the louder ones were the impacts of bodies carried by the gale.

  Something smashed through the window. We scattered. Evis snatched up the rolling projectile and hurled it back outside. I don’t think anyone but Darla saw its eyes or blood-soaked beard, and though she stood close and took my hand she didn’t scream.

  “Damn wand-wavers are gonna take the House down whether they means to or not,” shouted Mama. “I reckon it’s time.”

  Lightning joined the wind, bolt after bolt, so many and so fast they lit the window with a constant, harsh light. I could see limbs whipping, debris flying, blinding bolts of light arcing down, shadows flying briefly in the instant between being born and being extinguished by the next furious bolt.

  I heard words, in the thunder. The huldra exulted, echoing them, awash in the proximity and intensity of the sorcery being hurled just yards from my boots.

  Something in the forest roared, louder than the thunder, louder than the ringing in my ears. It roared and it charged, and we all saw monstrous blood-oaks go down,
saw them torn from the earth and cast aside as though they were brambles.

  And then came the stones. They fell from the sky, each trailing acrid smoke that lingered in the air and swirled about and burned eyes and choked throats. The stones fell almost silently, save for a whistling, but when they reached the ground, they simply obliterated all they touched with a flash and a crack even brighter and louder than the lightning.

  A stone struck the House, tearing through it from roof to cellar in the blink of an eye. The floor beneath us tilted. Timbers began to groan in a long, building, awful noise that that set my teeth on edge.

  A sudden rush of falling stones fell about the thing in the forest. More trees went flying, as it rolled, and then it was still.

  The rain of stones ceased. Then the lightning. Then the wind, which died as abruptly as it had been born, dropping its volleys of limbs and lumber in a single great tumble.

  Evis dared poke his head through the shattered window.

  He didn’t suddenly sprout arrows, so I let go of Darla and joined him.

  Outside was ruin.

  The catapults were simply gone. Only shallow craters remained. Bodies were everywhere. Many began to move as I watched, though with the clumsy, slow gestures of the stunned and the injured.

  A single glowing blue stave lay alone on the blackened earth. As I watched, a man clad in beggar’s clothes stumbled toward it, picked it up, and carried it toward the woods, ignoring the showers of sparks the thing loosed at his head.

  Evis shook his head.

  “The one with the red scarf. See him? Over there?”

  Evis pointed. I found the man he meant. He was on his back, a pair of longbow arrows lodged deep in his chest.

  As I watched, the man sat up, snapped off both arrows with no apparent hesitation or pain, and then rose to his feet and picked up a sword before calmly and methodically beginning to slaughter any injured soldiers stirring in the yard.

  “That’s not considered good sportsmanship,” whispered Evis. “Dead man or not.”

  I shuddered. Because the red-scarfed man was certainly dead. As he was joined by a dozen of his brethren, and then more and more and more staggered to their feet, I realized why they all seemed so familiar.

  They were dressed in rags. Some were barely dressed at all. All were filthy. Many were barefoot. But even in their disarray, there was something familiar about them all.

  They were familiar because I knew them. They were the Broken—the beggars, the weed-heads, the drunkards, the addicts. The men who’d survived the War in word only. The ones who’d returned with limbs intact, but their spirits slain or mortally, incurably wounded.

  And then I knew they hadn’t survived. They hadn’t returned. Not as the living.

  They belonged to the Corpsemaster. They always had. They walked among us, begging, lying still and silent in rags in alleys, haunting the docks, scrambling under porches and stoops—among us, but not living.

  They’d just been waiting. Waiting for Hisvin’s call.

  My heart sank. We knew. We knew the Corpsemaster’s dark secret, knew the source of his secret, private army—they were our dead. Harvested during the War, when there had been so many. He’d raised them up and he’d kept them walking and he’d brought them home, all so he could keep them against a day such as today.

  Evis turned away from the carnage. His dead white eyes held the same realization.

  Darla joined us. I pulled her away before she saw too much.

  “Who won?” she asked. “Is it over?”

  “Can’t say. Catapults are gone, though. They won’t be building any new ones tonight, either.”

  Darla frowned. “Then why do you look like you’ve seen your own ghost?”

  Evis spoke before I could answer.

  “Damn,” he said. “Damn damn damn.”

  I whirled. Evis had already turned from the window, and was heading for the door.

  “Time to go, ladies and banshees,” he said. “Right now.”

  Before I could speak, he laid hands to the makeshift barricade against the door and simply tore it away.

  Another casual heave pulled the bar from its mounts. He didn’t bother with the locks. He just shoved the door right out of its frame.

  I did risk a glance out the window. I did see soldiers ride out of the woods. They cleared a section of yard of Hisvin’s dead by riding them down, or pinning them to the ground with lances.

  Behind the mounted soldiers were more horses. They carried wheeled things behind them, things I’d never seen—fat black iron cylinders, each as long as a man was tall, and open and flared at one end. Each of the contrivances was riding on a pair of sturdy iron wheels and accompanied by four men on foot.

  The men quickly unhitched the things from their teams and wheeled them around so that the open ends pointed toward us. Then they gathered at the front of each contraption and busied themselves with bags and boxes.

  Evis grabbed me.

  “No time,” he said. “Go!”

  Darla grabbed my hand as I was propelled through the door. “I need an answer,” she said.

  We ran. Evis scooped a cussing Mama up and carried her while she kicked and scratched.

  “To what?”

  “You know what. Are we, or aren’t we?”

  Sara and Victor joined our charge. Victor took the fore, while Sara guarded the rear.

  We got down to the second floor before the mob ascending the stairs collided with Victor.

  Shouts turned to screams. I saw a couple of bodies go flying over the banister, arms flapping all the way down. I shouldered my way to the front and knocked a hatchet out of some terrified kid’s hand and pushed Victor’s blade aside as it flashed toward the throat of poor Scatter.

  They kept coming. Their faces told me Scatter and his brethren at the front of the charge would’ve run rather than face a trio of halfdead, but the mob behind them pushed them on.

  Victor snarled at me. I shoved my way in front of him, lashed out with a vicious toe-kick in some unfortunate’s groin, and just as Scatter flung his dagger at Victor and dived headlong over the rail there was a new blast and something struck the House below us with enough force to send us to our knees.

  Victor dropped his blade and simply grabbed and threw. I used knees and elbows and together we cleared the stairs.

  Smoke billowed, rising up. Another thunderous blast rang out, and another bone-jarring explosion sounded deep inside the House. There was a crash like a landslide and the wall beside us buckled so badly the shattered ends of timbers protruded suddenly through the cracked plaster.

  Evis joined the fray, surging ahead with such abandon he outpaced us all and was quickly surrounded by the men we’d just been fighting. All fled down the stairs, fight forgotten. They scarcely acknowledged each other as another blast and explosion added to the smoke and the panic.

  Darla’s hand slipped into mine.

  The House shook. Somewhere very close, parts of it collapsed with the sound of mountains breaking.

  “Well?”

  “We will,” I said. “If we get out of here.”

  “Promise? No delaying, no excuses, no years and years of waiting?”

  Another blast. The stairs tilted. I grabbed Mama, who nearly went off.

  “No waiting. Promise.”

  We ran. The stairs buckled and the walls leaned. Shafts of bright light sliced through the dark, here and there, and when I remembered there was no daylight I knew they must be from fires.

  We reached the foot of the stairs. The room was mostly buried in debris. The hall that led to the kitchen was choked nearly shut by the remains of the collapsed second floor.

  An arrow zipped through a gap in the wall and went skittering by my feet.

  A dozen of the staff were trying to open a path through the wreckage. Scatter was among them. He turned to me, his bloody face imploring.

  “All of you,” I said. “Follow us. If you so much as spit, Victor here will gut you. Got it
?”

  Another blast, another sudden fall of stone and wood.

  Nods all around. Those with weapons dropped them.

  “Good. The rest?”

  “Either in the tunnels or dead,” said Scatter. “Seen Lank head down when the first catapult threw.”

  “The Lady?”

  “Down there, I reckon.”

  Shouts sounded outside. I could hear them plain through the many gaps in the walls.

  Evis came charging up, trailing smoke and ashes. “We can still reach the other tunnel,” he said, coughing. I’d never seen a halfdead cough before. “Need to go now, though, while they reload.”

  Darla’s grip on my hand tightened.

  “Forget the tunnels. They’d just dig us out. Got thirty artists in there too. Can’t just leave them there.”

  “Finder, listen to me. We need to get underground. Right now.”

  “Take your people and go,” I said. “I wish you luck. But we’re not taking to the tunnels.”

  “You’d go where the Corpsemaster won’t dare?”

  “Can you think of a better hiding place?”

  Evis snarled, muttered something to Victor and Sara, and stalked off toward the gallery. He did not take the door that led to the second tunnel. He did give it a damned good kick as he passed.

  Darla found me a sooty half-smile. “Please tell me you’ve thought this out.”

  “In detail,” I lied. I grabbed her briefly, held her close. “Trust me,” I whispered. Forty pairs of eyes looked to me for salvation.

  “There’s another way out,” I shouted. “It’s magical. It’s dangerous. You can follow us, or try your luck with the other tunnel. We’re leaving. Keep up if you can.”

  I grabbed Darla’s hand and charged.

  They followed, one and all.

  I hoped I wasn’t merely adding to the numbers of the dead.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The gallery was largely intact, though the ceiling sagged and the walls bulged and a steady rain of plaster fell.

  The artists, bless them, still slept. I set Scatter and his fellows to moving them out of the way while Evis and the halfdead darted to and fro, arranging the paintings in a rough circle about the room.