by Logan Jacobs
“Okay, we’re going to bust up the inside of this building,” I informed the assembled, as I pointed at the bank.
“You’re going to what?” a familiar female voice inquired.
I looked over to see the haughty redhead approaching, under the shade of a frilly parasol. She was a vision of loveliness and she was frowning at what I’d just said.
“We need to destroy the floorboards of the bank,” I said.
“My father owns that bank,” Lucinda reminded me.
“He’s a responsible man, I trust that he’ll rebuild it to safety standards,” I replied. “Now, everyone, you’re going to knock out the floorboards, and then dig a hole underneath. As big and deep as you can make it in the time we’ve got. Leave the vaults alone. The potencium, the gold. All that stays where it is. Just the floor in the reception area where customers go up to the counter-- that gets replaced by a tunnel to the other side of the earth. Got it?”
“You could have at least asked permission,” Lucinda sighed.
“Did you come here to dig?” I inquired.
“I do not own a shovel,” she replied primly.
“I’m sure a loan could be arranged.”
“I came here to supervise,” she stated.
“Supervise them?” I gestured at the diggers. Silas moved among them energetically organizing the townspeople into work parties. “But you didn’t even know what their task was going to be.”
“Supervise you,” she answered.
“I’m not going to run off, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I said.
“Sticking around isn’t enough,” she replied. “You need to win. My very reputation depends upon it.”
“Your reputation?”
“Yes-- I was the one who hired you,” she said. Well, the town had hired me, strictly speaking. Although she had been personally responsible for soliciting donations the previous evening until she came up with the extra three hundred coins to add to the sum that the mayor provided from the town’s coffers. For better or worse, Lucinda was the kind of woman who had a habit of getting her way.
“Well, how am I doing so far?” I asked dryly. “In your professional opinion.”
“This, er, this matter of the… pit… it’s, it’s very… it’s something different,” Lucinda said finally.
I realized that for once she actually hadn’t had an opinion at all, beyond thinking that I should have requested her father’s permission to implement this architectural renovation.
“And we do need a change of some sort in our strategy.” she continued. “Although, the werewolves don’t like surprises. We’ve tried attacking them before, and they retaliate hard. If they fall in this pit, which I suppose is your plan, they’ll be very angry.”
“I plan for them to be angry long before they fall in the pit,” I replied. “Speaking of which, where is the blacksmith in this town?”
“Two doors to the right of that blue house,” Lucinda pointed. “But the blacksmith is there.” She pointed at a man walking toward the door of the bank with a pickaxe in hand.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Danny,” she said.
“Danny!” I called out. The man who Lucinda had indicated turned in surprise to see who was addressing him. I beckoned him over. “Others will tear down the bank. I need you for another task. Something more specialized.”
“Okay,” he said uncertainly. “What do you want? I don’t really have time to forge weapons, since the full moon is tonight.”
“I know,” I said. “Speaking of which. Silas!”
Silas came over eagerly when I called him, almost like a puppy dog.
“Whoever you don’t need for breaking down the floor and digging the pit, have them gather the planks from the floor and whatever other spare lumber there is in town, and sharpen a bunch of stakes, six feet long or so,” I instructed.
“Right you are,” he agreed, and bounded off again.
Danny and I walked over to his forge, with Lucinda following along.
“You don’t want to help Silas manage the volunteers?” I suggested to her.
“My primary job is supervising you,” she stated, as solemnly as if someone other than herself had actually assigned her that job.
“What about tea with your fiancé?” I reminded her. It wasn’t that I minded Lucinda’s presence. She was awfully easy on the eyes after all. I just didn’t want her second-guessing my decisions and wasting time that we already didn’t have enough of.
“I already drank it,” she replied as she raised a pretty eyebrow. “Why does that matter to you, anyway?”
I didn’t bother to answer that one, because the answer was that it didn’t matter.
“So what do you want me to make, exactly?” Danny asked me. “If not weaponry.”
“A fence,” I said. “A fence of silver stakes.”
“Th-that would take a long time,” Danny stammered. “And a lot of silver.”
“What if each side of the fence were only about a foot long?” I suggested. “Three sides. Three feet. And, the stakes don’t have to be any taller than a man’s finger.”
“I suppose I could do that,” he said.
“Lucinda, can you find a boy to run around and collect arrows from every house, and bring them here?” I asked. “Also silverware. Any pure silver utensils that people will give up. Find several children and send them round at the same time.”
She narrowed her eyes because she didn’t seem to want to leave my side, but then she nodded and glided out of the room.
Meanwhile, I stayed with Danny and explained to him the exact design that I wanted for my miniature fence.
“And when you’re done with that, and the arrows start coming in, I want you to tip them all with silver,” I said.
“You mean make silver heads for them?” he asked. “I don’t think there’s time.”
“No, that won’t be necessary,” I said. “A daub of pure silver should do the trick. No bigger than a coin. The steel arrow heads will penetrate the werewolves’ flesh, and then whatever flesh they carried the silver through, will not seal up again. It doesn’t require a large hole in someone’s heart or brain to destroy them.”
“Fair enough,” Danny said.
“If you have any questions, send one of the children to come get me,” I said. “I’ll be over at the bank.”
“I’ll get straight to work then,” Danny said.
For the rest of the day, I moved back and forth between Danny’s forge and the bank, supervising progress on all the projects. Lucinda hovered over me like an extremely judgmental guardian angel. Her father came out from their house a few times to survey the town’s progress. He also donated all the silverware in his house to be melted down in Danny’s forge, except for a silver fork and a silver knife that I pocketed myself.
Theo stayed at the bank and helped with any manual labor that was requested of him. He was especially good at breaking planks with his hooves. He kept threatening to return to the shade of the Fairfax stable, but after a while I suspected that he had no real intention of doing so and simply said it to provoke the townspeople into begging him to stay and protesting that they couldn’t finish the project without him. Theo liked to have his coat brushed, but he loved to have his ego stroked even more.
When I calculated that we only had a few hours of daylight left, I declared the pit inside the bank to be big enough, and had the volunteers start implanting sharpened wooden stakes at the base. Once that was done, we covered the opening of the pit back over with planks that had been strategically weakened to snap as soon as someone stepped on them.
The children started running out to deliver quarrels full of newly silver-daubed arrows. I took ten volunteers to serve as archers and assigned them positions on the roofs and at the windows of nearby buildings where they would have clear shots at anyone approaching the bank.
Then I took the miniature fence that Danny had welded together, with one extra-long stake that ende
d in a knob, and buried it in front of the bank so that only the knob poked above the dirt, and was hidden by a patch of weeds.
“Well, that’s everything, then,” I said to the assembled townspeople as I stood up.
Over the course of the day, our volunteer task force had grown to include almost all of Richcreek. Even those who were too old or weak to dig helped with the hunt for supplies, or by providing food and drink to the workers. I heard them talking and laughing amongst themselves as they worked. Human nature was funny that way. You could dawdle away at an ordinary and not particularly difficult task that you did every day and be grim and sour about it. But you could work frantically to prepare for a bloody fight with lives and livelihoods hanging in the balance and find that you’d never enjoyed anything more than that.
The townspeople paused with shovels in hand and stared at me, overcome with a sudden sense of solemnity as they all realized that the hour of moonlight was approaching. Tonight would be different. Tonight wouldn’t just involve cowering in their homes hoping against hope not to hear the snarling of a werewolf at the door and feel the timbers shudder as a monstrous half-human form hurled itself against them and creeping out at dawn to calculate the town’s collective losses. Tonight Richcreek was making a stand, and either the werewolves’ reign of terror would be ended for good, or the town itself would be massacred.
“Most of you should go home now,” I said. “You’ve done your part, and you’ve done it well. But those of you who want to stay on as pikemen, there are plenty of spare stakes for you,” I said as I gestured at a pile of them.
There was some hesitation. The dozens of townspeople exchanged glances. Some of them clasped their hands and moved their mouths apparently in prayer. Then the crowd gradually sorted itself out. Two-thirds trailed off to their homes, either because they didn’t want to fight or because their priority was to protect their own families. That included Lucinda and her father, and her fiancé, who decided to stay in their home with them for the night in order to guard them. Theo went with them to return to their stable. The other third of the group, consisting of eleven men and two women, picked up stakes and awaited further instructions.
“Divide yourselves between the vaults,” I said. “Be ready to defend them against any werewolves who try to escape through the back.”
They proceeded to enter the bank and carefully pick their way across the treacherous floor in a single file line. We’d left a single beam that was solid, which you couldn’t tell from the others unless you knew which one it was.
The archers, meanwhile, started climbing up to assume the rooftop positions that I had assigned them earlier. Once there, they laid flat on their bellies and tried to blend in with the shadows.
With everyone in place, the town appeared quiet, even peaceful. Yet the air felt thick with a smog of terror and anger mingled with joy and hope. But I didn’t know if that was a tangible atmosphere exuded from the skin of the townspeople that the werewolves would be able to sniff out, or if it just felt that way to me because I’d been a part of the events that produced it and was in on the secrets that this night held.
I was the only person out in the open, because my position was next to the silver knob that connected to the buried fence. I crouched there. Maybe in the night I could pass for a rock or at least some kind of furtive woodland critter.
Aware of each other and drawing strength from each other’s proximity, yet each one of us alone locked inside our separate minds, we waited in the darkness for the monsters to come.
Chapter 6
When the werewolves came, I could sense them almost before I consciously heard or saw any sign of them. My skin prickled, and I knew I was being watched, by something other than my archers. Then there was movement on the plains, and shadows gathered themselves up from the long grasses and bounded toward the town.
The shadows had a wrongness to them. They walked neither on two legs nor on four, but something in between, dropping sometimes to gallop, at other times staggering upright for a few paces. They were too hulking and shaggy to be men, with knees that were bent the wrong way, and their chests were too broad and flat for any kind of quadruped’s, with long ape-like arms that swung freely at their sides. I felt sure that wolves would have found them just as monstrous as humans did.
One of them paused and let out a bloodcurdling howl. I found the howls of normal wolves to be achingly beautiful, but this was halfway between that and a human scream of agony. The rest of the werewolves howled, barked, and yipped in response, and again the sounds were too expressive to be purely animal, it sounded more like some primitive people speaking in a foreign language that I could almost, but not quite, understand.
Then they all dropped to all fours and charged right for the bank. As they approached, I could make out the details of hulking musculature, patchy, bristling fur, jaundiced yellow bloodshot eyes. Even healthy werewolves always tended to look like they had some kind of plague. They weren’t a naturally occurring race. They were the monstrous creation of some sorcerer in ancient times who had used them to terrorize the villages of an enemy king. There had been many campaigns to eradicate them in the centuries since, many rulers who had set prices on their pelts, and yet they had taken firm root in the world and continued to exist.
Then the wind changed direction, and I could smell their scent, which was more like a dead animal than a live one, except for the potent musk. The two werewolves in the lead seemed to see me even though I was staying as still as possible, or maybe they simply detected my human smell, and came barreling toward me.
I clasped the tiny silver knob in my hand and waited, but right when the first werewolf leapt at my throat, I made the fence grow.
The silver spines erupted out of the ground like some kind of lethal metallic plant and formed a three-walled perimeter in front of the bank. The extra-long post with the knob at the top that I was holding became twelve feet tall, I was carried up off the ground clinging to it. But I wasn’t the only one borne aloft. A few yards down from me, a werewolf thrashed atop the fence, his body impaled by two stakes. The first casualty of the night.
The other werewolves lunged at the stakes snarling and tried to squeeze their bodies through.
“Loose!” I yelled from atop my perch.
Arrows rained down from the surrounding roofs into the mass of furred and struggling bodies. Some of them fell to the ground. Others that hadn’t been hit, or at least not fatally so, backed up for a running start to launch themselves over the fence, or ran around to the ends of the fence in order to go around it, although the longer trip exposed them to more arrows. I forced the fence to spurt another few feet and in that way managed to impale a second werewolf just as he was about to clear it. A spine burst through the taut skin of his round belly, where the fur grew shortest, and blood gushed from the wound and dripped down the bright silver like clotted berry jam. He struggled to free himself, and that just tore his stomach open wider, until I could see pale, ropy entrails squeezing out.
That was as tall as I could make the fence, though. My ability had its limits, regardless of the fresh potencium that still simmered warmly in my stomach. Certain objects were easier than others to grow or shrink, which I think had to do with the materials they were composed of, and possibly the complexity of their structures as well. I didn’t know what the exact formula was, so I could only ever estimate how big or small I’d be able to make a thing until I tried it, unless it was an object with which I were already very familiar, such as my sword. I hadn’t worn my sword today since the steel would be useless against werewolves.
I had, however, brought along a silver fork and knife from the Fairfaxes’ dining set. I pulled out the fork first. There were several werewolves leaping at me, snarling and frothing at the mouth. Their jaws came within inches of my legs but they were struggling to reach me since I was hanging on the knob with my feet about ten feet off the ground, planted on the two lumps of metal I’d had Danny solder onto the extra-long post
for just that purpose. They’d been barely visible when the fence was in its original form, just two tiny textural bumps, but now they were the size of watermelons.
I enlarged the fork into a pitchfork of sorts. It was actually a lot more unwieldy than a proper pitchfork would have been, since the handle was broad instead of spindly, and there was a flat part above the tines designed for shoveling food, which just added unnecessary weight in this case, but there hadn’t been time to have Danny modify it. I could only make the fork about three feet long, not because of the limitations of my power, but because if I made it any longer, the handle would have become too broad to fit in one hand, and I needed my other hand to continue gripping the pole.
A three-foot weapon wasn’t long enough for me to reach any of the werewolves below while they were still on the ground. It was, however, long enough for me to wait until the next one leapt up, and drive the tines into his face right before his jaws would have sunk into my calf. He slid off and crumpled to the ground and left the last six inches of my fork tines bloody. The werewolves’ faces were as monstrous as their bodies, not like the beautiful faces of wolves, but squashed inward to approach the flatter dimensions of human faces. The leathery noses were halfway between canine noses and bulbous human ones, and the long, sharp teeth were fully canine, but set in jaws that were shaped like an ape’s.
I used my fork to jab away another attacker, although I didn’t manage to deal him a fatal blow. The other werewolves seemed less inclined to crowd around me after that. The archers continued raining down volleys of silver-tipped arrows. I counted about eight of the werewolves that already lay dead.
As the first werewolf successfully cleared the fence without being brought down by arrows and I saw that he was going to make it into the bank, I abruptly shrank the fence back down and landed with my two feet on the ground. With their chief obstacle suddenly removed, all six of the surviving werewolves surged for the door of the bank.