by Kim Newman
I held back from murdering anyone not actively trying to kill me, but we were not all so fastidious and I made no great effort to stop anyone from slaughtering the fallen.
Lieutenant Majin watched, as happy to see his own troops killed as his enemies. All blood was an offering to Taira no Masakado.
Spears thrown at Majin turned aside. Even O-Same, who swooped from above, was repelled, bouncing off an unseen barrier like a rubber cannonball. Majin’s palm-out halt gesture projected the seiman sign in the air in a puff of purple counter-flame. He was snug inside a protective sphere – invisible ectoplasmic armour.
Inside the head of the statue, Black Ocean soldiers were busy. The hinged green jaw ratcheted open. Boiling oil spewed.
I saw a mass of liquid pouring at me then it was blotted out and deflected. Oil rained all around me, hissing and steaming in the snow, but I didn’t get gallons of fire full in the face.
I looked up and saw Kasa-obake hovering – umbrella stretched out in a perfect circle, exposing the flesh frills and bone struts of his underside. Oil spattered as he spun like a pinwheel. I would have to apologise to the yōkai for thinking him trivial.
Damn – Dru had been right again. ‘An umbrella is always of use.’
Kasa-obake couldn’t protect all of us. Bearing the brunt of the oil raised blisters on his corrugated hide.
I saluted him.
Someone with a rifle fired into the statue’s head – crack! crack! crack! Majin’s minions weren’t shielded by his mystic barrier. Soldiers were dropped by sniper fire. The last of the oil dribbled from the mouth.
I looked back towards the ice mountain and saw Lady Oyotsu sitting demurely on an open palanquin, ornamental kimono arranged around her like a vast silk water lily. Her neck was extended to its fullest. High up on the white muscle tube – gripping with his knees and a loop of one arm, as if he’d shinned up a tree – was Sergeant Dravot, a high-powered hunting rifle steadied against his shoulder. He called out clipped instructions. The yōkai craned to give him sniper’s vantage points. He fired through the eyeholes of the statue’s demon-mask belt buckle. More minions were potted.
It was hard to tell from below, but I think the Abbess was smiling. She manages the expression by pinching her mouth into a circle and widening her eyes. This covers her blackened teeth. She has become self-conscious since noticing Westerners take her for a toothless crone. She craned and arched her neck like a rearing serpent to get a panoramic view of the battle. From his position, Dravot kept firing. Like Kasa-obake, Lady Oyotsu must have been grateful for a chance to demonstrate that her unique abilities were actually useful. Being patronised as harmless and amusing (if slightly disturbing) must pall after centuries.
An agile, barefoot vampire child in a white shift – someone I didn’t know, lank-haired and of indeterminate sex, fresh out of the coffin – ascended the statue, swift as a monkey, finding hand and footholds where there shouldn’t be any, dodging missiles. She slipped through the eyehole of the belt-buckle face. Flashes of gunfire and curtailed screams told of severe damage done to guards who had kept out of Dravot’s range. A ragged torso, shoulder gushing where an arm was wrenched off, stuck out of the mouth hole like an impudent tongue, splashing the statue’s skirt as if the mighty warrior had gorily wet himself.
Would the child – who was probably older than me – be able to get close to Majin?
The small creature crawled out of an epaulette hatch on the statue’s shoulder, arms gloved and sleeved with blood.
With a mechanical creak, the statue raised a hand and shooed the vampire off its shoulder as if brushing away a fly.
Majin’s statue had moved – stirring to a semblance of life! Instinctively, the besieging crowd moved back, making space around the tree-trunk legs. If the statue could swat, it could also stamp.
The child smacked against the wall and clung there, head shaking.
‘Give that one a medal,’ said Kostaki.
‘As far as I’m concerned, she can have a Fabergé Easter egg,’ I said.
The Captain had blood on his face. His coat was slashed, but any wounds had healed quickly. He saluted me with his carrack. For him, this – a battle – is home.
Majin didn’t deign to notice the child batted away by the statue. He was busy conjuring his earthquake. His gloves were white flames – sigils picked out in a filament so red it imprinted on my vision if I closed my eyes.
More and more cracks ripped through the streets, rocks grinding together and pulling apart. Buildings toppled but the wall stayed firm. Seismic activity was confined to Yōkai Town. Surely it couldn’t be contained?
In the end, didn’t Majin want to bring down all Tokyo?
‘Seek safe ground,’ said Kostaki.
‘Easier said than done,’ said Whelpdale. He wore a samurai helmet and breastplate over checked tweeds. His arms were longer than usual and double-elbowed. ‘That johnny up there’s doing all this, you know.’
We did.
‘Something ought to be done about his ruddy cheek!’
‘All suggestions welcome,’ I said.
Whelpdale thought about it for a moment, and had a bright idea. He opened his mouth to tell us his blindingly simple, inarguably practical solution for all our woes and raised his finger like a pedagogue about to impress the class with a brilliant observation… then was shocked into silence.
A scythe claw pinned his borrowed helmet to his skull, piercing his head. A black barb stuck out through the fleshy part of his jaw.
Whelpdale’s eyes worked and he tried to speak. His cheeks fell to his jowls and his nose melted like wax.
The claw was withdrawn with a liquid scraping sound. Whelpdale dropped like a scarecrow stuffed with potatoes.
The claw came towards me. I met it with the katana.
Silver bit into chitin, but didn’t slice through.
I looked up and saw Clare Mallinger’s face peeping over the side of the jorōgumo body. She had grown considerably. Her original head was a pimple on the neck of the huge spider-head that swung around to stare at me. Its eyes popped and reformed as Sergeant Dravot put silver bullets into them. Tears of yellow ichor dripped onto black fur.
‘Clare, you’ve let yourself go…’
She opened her mouth to show teeth as black as Lady Oyotsu’s and breathed a cloud of butterflies. Was this where they came from? Though I knew it was useless, I made sword-passes that cut through the cloud.
O-Same was still drifting overhead. Tossed away by Majin, she concentrated on pulling her flame-body back together. Even she could be injured.
The butterflies bit.
The claw-tipped leg – not one of the spider’s usual eight, but an extra, many-jointed limb grown just for stabbing – darted again. Though halfblinded by little wings and my own blood, I warded it off.
The creature swept yōkai and vampires away from the statue. Majin saluted the spider-woman and the statue raised its fist in the same gesture.
The jorōgumo fed its mouths with many hands, stuffing in whomever it could reach – yōkai, vampires, oni-soldiers, corpses. Mr Bats and I tried chopping at its legs. It was like attacking an ancient oak with butter-knives. Clare burped more butterflies. Curtains of ropy web spurted from her spinnerets, congealing into strings sharp as piano wires. They fell on the unwary and tightened, cutting through skin and into bone.
The jorōgumo was the statue’s beast. The giant warrior stretched its arm in a ‘good dog’ gesture, then waved.
The statue mimicked Majin’s quake-conjuring gestures. Gears wrenched in its shoulders and elbows. It was a vast automaton, not some stone golem. Steam hissed from its epaulettes. It wasn’t all machinery, though. There was magic too. Seiman seals glowed on its palms, heated from within.
Artillery might have helped – shells with silver shrapnel – or a Gatling gun. Even so, Whelpdale wouldn’t have bet on victory. The jorōgumo must have a heart – most spiders do, even if only a simple tube that pumps haemolymph through arter
ies. And Clare’s original heart must be plumbed into the new works somewhere. It would take a skilled speculative anatomist with an advanced degree in unusual vampire-spider physiology to locate any organ worth staking. And a more skilled sea-hunter than Death Larsen – who’d shoot basking seals before daring anything as chancy as hurling harpoons at leviathans – to stick a length of silver through it.
I’d given up on appealing to Clare’s better nature, as rare an animal as safe ground in an earthquake. Little of the human – or even of the conventional vampire – was left in her.
Take a moment to mourn a monster. Ghastly as Clare Mallinger was, this was not what she had expected of life. A doctor’s daughter in a dreary market town. Cruel in small, pointless ways. With the Ascendancy, she was turned by some thoughtless shapeshifter barely out of the grave himself, then tinkered with by her amateur scientist father. Set loose to fend for herself, she killed without compunction. Humiliated in court, she was clapped in a box and packed off out of sight of decent people, got rid of in the hold of a tramp steamer, despatched like a parcel with a false address written on it to be infected and eaten from the inside by an insect-minded alien, and subsumed into the grotesque body of whatever she was now. Without Dracula in the world, Clare would be organising parish theatricals, setting her cap at the squire’s son, gloating over dresses fetched from London months before her local rivals had a hope of anything as fine. Objectively, she’d have been a horrible woman but she wouldn’t have a death toll to rival Messalina and her heart wouldn’t be lost inside an arachnid behemoth.
But only a moment’s mourning.
I still had to do my best not to get killed by poor dear Clare.
25
YOKAI TOWN, DECEMBER 22, 1899
I nipped in and out of the alleys around Mermaid Ancestor Place, seeking cover to avoid being speared like Whelpdale. Kostaki and Mr Bats were close behind me. Clare the Spider was galumphing to squeeze into the warren of the market and get at us. She was staying close to Majin. The ground still heaved. I choked on brick dust, dead butterflies, smuts and ice pellets. The fog had burned away, but acidic smoke puffed up through the cracks in the pavement. Dragon’s breath. Slow death in case anyone survived the quick variety raining down on Yōkai Town.
In the market, stray oni-soldiers popped up like ducks in a shooting gallery, too terrified to be much of a threat. Bloody foam bubbled through the wooden rictus grins of their demon masks. The boost was wearing off and the side effects were increasing. Had they known they were suicide troops?
I huddled in the sweet-smelling wreck of an incense stall. Kostaki and Mr Bats joined me.
Why now?
While I was in a cage in Castle Kawataro, things had changed. Drastically.
Lieutenant Majin didn’t decide to abandon slow Go just because I was locked up. Until tonight, his strategy was death by a thousand cuts. Myriad little moves to wear down the denizens of Yōkai Town with the odd orchestrated earthquake and session of the Suicide Garden to shake things up. And implanting the jorōgumo egg in Clare Mallinger? The plan was working, too. Others supported Lord Kawataro’s cry of ‘death to all foreign devils’ and we’d got bets down on which of our coffined elders would declare themselves the Count of Yōkai Town and try to massacre or enslave our hosts. On our passenger list are appalling rivals of Dracula: Baron von Rysselbert, Constantin Tirescu – packed off to the Orient following botched coups.
Framing me was a typical Majin tactic. He didn’t even need to kill anyone himself, because he could get us to tear out each other’s throats. Painting me black made the rest of our informal council seem culpable. Taking an interpreter out of the situation increased the likelihood of drastic misunderstandings.
Oh, wonderful, I thought bitterly – realising, days too late, that Goké was Majin’s plant in Yōkai Town. A qualified replacement for me, even with a horror-gob in his forehead, was too convenient for belief, though Christina (and I) believed it all the same. Where was the smarmy, two-faced – at least, two-mouthed – worm? When last mentioned, he was in the Princess’s deputation of ‘respectable vampires’. Much potential for mischief there. In the event, wasted.
So, why the sudden hurry?
All at once: a giant spider-woman on the rampage, armies of masked killers let loose, a major earthquake, a warrior statue come to life, and an iceberg erupting in the middle of the district.
Death stones on the board!
More death stones than regular pieces.
‘How did this start?’ I asked Kostaki. ‘The battle?’
‘With the temple,’ he said. ‘We had just found Josef Cervenka, dead like the others. I was arguing with Kawataro about you. Then, a burst of light… and the ice was there. A pyramid, built out of nothing.’
That didn’t sound right.
‘Majin did something at the temple?’ I prompted. ‘To get to Yuki-Onna?’
Kostaki shook his head. Mr Bats cocked an ear to listen to us.
‘Majin wasn’t there,’ said Kostaki. ‘He didn’t make the ice mountain. He didn’t start the attack until after it appeared. It was…’
I suddenly had a headache and sunbursts behind my eyes.
I knew what Kostaki was about to say…
Christina Light.
Majin didn’t have the initiative. He was reacting. To a move the Princess made. She was the one who had tried to get to Yuki-Onna.
The result – a frozen explosion in the temple – took the Demon Man by surprise, and rattled him so badly he changed his game. The Princess put the fear of something into him. With his connection to Taira no Masakado, Lieutenant Majin ought to be immune to ordinary terrors. At Jisatsu No Niwa, he showed no fear of Christina. He stood by and watched me fix her arm when he could have finished her off. Something had changed since then. Majin set about destroying Yōkai Town and its inhabitants because his hand was forced. He must be suddenly, unexpectedly vulnerable. We could use that to our advantage. This wasn’t his plan. This was improvisation.
Majin wouldn’t put on such a display unless both he and his scheme were in jeopardy.
So, we knew what he was afraid of. Whom he was afraid of.
The Woman of the Snow.
Majin could be defeated like that long-ago jorōgumo pretender with an unnatural winter. He wouldn’t be the only one to lose. The country would be a frozen waste. Millions would die while Yuki-Onna slept on, serene under ice. If I was right, we vampires would sleep too. I doubted we’d be left in peace. If we weren’t to be trusted not to kill a country, we’d burn. Was this why Dracula let us leave – to visit disaster on territory he couldn’t conquer? Was he confident we’d become some other tyrant’s problem?
Majin wants us to kill each other, but he’s grown impatient, Christina had said in my mind. If we won’t do the job for him, he’ll pour water on the ants’ nest. He’s started already.
So, she could lie via her astral telegraph by omission. When she reached me in my cage, she knew it was her fault.
I supposed I should be grateful she’d sent Kostaki to fetch me – though that was at least as much his idea as hers. However, she had impressed on me that I was needed.
She needed me. To get her – to get us all – out of her mess. And where was she?
My headache was getting worse, so I thought I’d soon find out.
‘A big quake’s coming,’ said Kostaki. ‘I feel it in my knee.’
He was right. Pots of scented powder rattled and spilled. Tiles slid from roofs and broke on the rippling street, exploding into shrapnel.
Racing the tremor – which brought down shacks and walls as we passed – I ran out of the market, with Kostaki and Mr Bats close behind. We emerged from the cover of Mermaid Ancestor Place into thick, pelting snow.
A blizzard whirled through Yōkai Town.
* * *
Streets and parks I’d learned to recognise were under rubble. But the spouting ice mountain – a snowcano, if you will! – towered over Yōkai Town. We strove to rea
ch it.
We made slow going over glassy sheet ice, using sheathed swords as walking sticks. I felt the cold through the soles of my boots. Frail elders, in peril of losing our footing and taking nasty falls. The unnatural ice was hard as stone.
Ahead was the Temple of One Thousand Monsters. If anything was left of it.
Higo Yanagi was a fixed landmark. Snow piled up to her lower branches. Her human aspect was buried to the waist. She cradled Popejoy, who was broken and bleeding badly. A concave wound where his nose used to stick out suggested someone had heaved a chunk of granite at his face. Higo brushed his forehead with delicate fronds. Her human tears trickled onto him.
‘You should’ve seed the other guy,’ he said, coughing up blood.
‘He murderalised the palooka,’ explained Higo, proudly.
Popejoy managed a ruined smile at the willow woman’s improved vocabulary.
For a warm man, the sailor had battled the odds. He had biffed goblins, boffed ogres and outroughed incarnate death gods! He had tossed immortal fiends about like shanty-town goons.
But he was finished now.
Kostaki and Mr Bats guarded my back as I looked over the battered sailor. Higo was a good nurse. She’d bound the worst of his injuries with her sticky bark. I’m not surprised that helped. The new wonder cure aspirin – sold as patent medicine around the world – is essentially willow sap. Higo could take away Popejoy’s pain. But she couldn’t put him back together.
He was dying… unless…
It’s something I’ve always shied away from. Yes – vampire blood (like mine) is a cure-all, providing the patient doesn’t mind the side effects: turning vampire, and what’s more becoming my get. In centuries of treating the sick and dying, I have had precious few cases worth that roll of the dice. And they’ve always come up snake eyes. The turn is most likely to be a success if the aspirant vampire is in the pink of health. The dying are by definition less promising subjects, though the extremity of their need inspires foolish attempts. I have no get, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t wanted to pass on the Dark Kiss. When I realised Annie Marriner had let me bleed her to the edge of a precipice, I tried to force her to suckle from my wrist. She wouldn’t let a drop pass her lips, and died – leaving me with an ache I’ll never be rid of.