by Sam Hooker
Roman answered through gritted teeth as he wrestled with the Tetrapocrypha. “Yes, Your Dominance.”
The Domnitor! Long may he reign. She’d done it! She’d gone to Stagralla and kidnapped him. Sloot had known about the plot! He was tangentially involved in the abduction of his liege! And not even with the particular plot that had been launched by his fellow salts in Uncle. Sloot harbored serious doubts that this would end well.
Vlad turned then to Nicoleta. “Stop the stars.”
“I will, Your Dominance.”
Vlad nodded, and then she jumped.
That was unexpected, though mathematically speaking, Sloot should have seen it coming. Heroic types like Vlad seldom approached danger in a way that he found sensible.
Sloot threw caution to the wind and craned his neck through the portal just in time to see Vlad land shield-first on the topmost goblin in the pile, sending the whole swaying structure collapsing inward on itself.
“Vhat is she doing?” shouted Bartleby from behind a shelf. He fired a few more blasts from his wand through the portal.
“What she does best,” said Nicoleta. “Come on, we’ve got to help her!”
“How?” asked Sloot.
“Wait for the wizards to stop shooting into the portal,” said Myrtle. Her eyes went black and her leathery wings unfolded. “When they’re focused on Vlad, I’ll slip in behind them.”
“Take me with you,” said Franka, before Sloot had an opportunity to raise any objections. She crouched on the stone floor in front of Myrtle, sword in one hand and wand in the other. Myrtle shrugged and placed her hands on Franka’s shoulders.
What could Sloot do? He was keen to be useful, in some auxiliary capacity, of course. He couldn’t make coffee for everyone, so that was out. How about the minutes? Were minutes usually recorded for battles? How would anybody know what happened otherwise? He’d heard lots of stories about valiant warriors who committed acts of what might have turned out to be stupidity, only they worked out well, so they were reported as acts of bravery instead. He supposed that was what bravery was, in the end. Risks that turned out well.
“Now!” shouted Nicoleta. The magical bombardment had ceased, and she was watching all of the Serpents of the Earth’s wizards directing their fire into the towering pile of goblins, trying to hit Vlad.
That’s low, thought Sloot. Weren’t the goblins and the evil wizards supposed to be on the same side? Evil and indecent. Not respectable evil, like murderers who only go after people who smugly say “I could have told you that.”
It quickly dawned on Sloot that only most of the wizards were shooting at Vlad. A few of them, one of whom had to be Gregor, were lurking in the ring of stones behind the border “castle.” Sloot only had a moment to enjoy having been right about the location when it occurred to him what was happening. The pile of goblins and the wizards firing wands at them were a distraction! They were probably very close to completing the ritual for the Serpent of the Sky.
“Wait,” said Sloot, just as Franka and Myrtle leaped through the portal. They banked together into the dark of night, circling around to sneak up on the distracted wizards.
“Wait for what?” asked Nicoleta.
“Vait until they see vhat I can blast them vith, now that I’ve got a moment to prepare,” said Bartleby.
“Later,” shouted Roman. “Come help me shut the clasp on the Tetrapocrypha, will you?”
“The wizards,” said Sloot, “and the goblins. It’s all a ruse! Look over there, at the castle!”
“I’m not seeing any castle,” said Nicoleta, squinting along the horizon.
“It’s not a—oh, the pile rocks!”
“What are they ... oh, no,” said Nicoleta. “Sloot, you’ve got to warn them!”
“Me? How can I possibly—”
“Just float down there and do it,” Nicoleta snapped. “I’ve got to deal with things up here! You two, the binding strap has to wrap around the Tetrapocrypha the other way. No, the other way!”
I really wish I could do something useful, Sloot had thought before. That had been foolish. The forces that control the universe are always listening, and they’re very good at catching people lying to themselves. For Sloot, wishing that he could do something useful was his subconscious’ way of saying “I really want to hide behind something and wait this out, but I don’t want to feel cowardly about it.”
Stupid forces that control the universe, Sloot thought. This is what my aspirations to a slightly lower grade of faintheartedness have done for me. Why couldn’t I have simply enjoyed a cold oblivion devoid of existence after death?
“Get going!” Nicoleta shouted.
Sloot closed his eyes and propelled himself forward. He was pleasantly disappointed, upon opening one eye, to see that he was not plummeting toward the ground as he’d expected, but floating gently toward it. His disappointment turned unpleasant when he opened the other eye and turned to look at the swarming congress of goblins.
You never forget how you died. Well, Sloot had been dead for a while now, and he hadn’t forgotten how he died. It hadn’t yet been forever, but the feeling of being crushed to death under a congress of goblins was still very vivid in his mind. He tried to take some small comfort in the fact that there were no undead mixed in this time, but it was no good. His mind simply couldn’t count absence of the undead in a teeming pile of violence as a bright side.
Vlad was in there. She needed to know that she was fighting the wrong fight, which meant that Sloot was going to have to tell her. All of the logic that applied to disembodied spirits—if you could really call it logic—told him that he’d come to absolutely no harm by wading into the fray, but it didn’t help. He could still feel their weight on his chest, crushing the life from him.
He looked back up to the portal, hoping against hope to see Nicoleta floating down, having finished dealing with the Tetrapocrypha. No such luck.
Nothing left to do but dive in, then. He gave brief consideration to the possibility that it might be fun. He shook his head. Nope, he wouldn’t be fooling himself that way. Educational, perhaps? Slightly more convincing than “fun,” but it still wasn’t helping. As expertise in piles of goblins went, Sloot felt that he already knew everything he needed.
Duty, then. That was something Sloot understood. He was a true salt of the Old Country, through and through. Never mind that he was doing his duty to the Carpathian sovereign. If there was one thing that every salt knew, it was duty.
He firmed up his resolve to simply march into the swarming throng, and nearly followed through with it before stopping just at its edge.
A toe. Why not just a toe? Sloot was well aware that time was running short, but what if he was wrong? What if he could get hurt? He wouldn’t be any good to anyone dead. Deader? No matter. He slowly pushed one foot toward a pair of goblins who seemed to be trying to dig their way into the pile, and the worst possible thing that could have happened did: they noticed him.
A pair of broad, needle-toothed grins turned themselves on Sloot. They crouched and started reaching slowly, gently toward him, as though he were a deer in a petting zoo. One which they were very keen to eat.
“Er, hello,” said Sloot with a nervous smile. “Lovely night for a brawl, isn’t it? How do you think it’s going so far?”
One of the goblins lunged forward and grabbed at Sloot’s waist, to Sloot’s high-pitched, screaming terror; however, predictably, the goblin fell through him and ended up face-first in the dirt.
“Terribly sorry,” said Sloot, before he was able to stop himself. “Are you all right?”
The goblin was on its feet and snarling. It wheeled and jumped through Sloot again, landing claws-first on its comrade, and either oblivious or indifferent to the fact that it was rending the guts of its kin.
Considering all of the factors, Sloot could not in good conscience avoid the inevitable any longer. He steeled his nerves as best he could, which was hardly at all, and floated into the quagmire. Had he n
ot been so deeply invested in the compounded trauma that was now piling onto his psyche, he might have thought it interesting to see what it looked like inside one of these. In the tightest, load-bearing parts of the structure, most of the goblins were just sort of wriggling helplessly or passed out altogether. Sloot kept moving in the direction that must have been toward the center, where Vlad would undoubtedly be.
He was only off by a dozen yards or so, but he’d heard Vlad’s battle cries often enough to know them when he heard them. He shifted his course and ended up in what he could only describe as a constantly collapsing dome of shadowy smoke surrounding Vlad. She turned constantly, bashing forward with her shield, swinging wide with her hammer, kicking out with her spiked steel boots, and dispatching goblins by the score in puffs of smoke.
“Your Dominance!” shouted Sloot.
“Peril, isn’t it?”
“It is, Your Dominance.”
“Speak quickly, I’m busy.”
“Er, yes, Your Dominance. Sorry, Your Dominance.”
With a minimal amount of stammering and apologies, Sloot told Vlad about the castle and the ruse. After a trip up to the top of the pile and back down again, he got Vlad turned in the direction of the circle of stones behind the castle. She fought her way slowly, inexorably through the goblin horde in that direction.
“Tell me, Peril,” said Vlad.
“Yes, Your Dominance?”
“Have you ever seen this many goblins in one place?”
“I can’t say that I have, Your Dominance.” That was true. Until that day, the most goblins he’d ever seen at once had been at the Fall of Salzstadt. While that had been a large enough congress to demand swear words to describe it, it paled in comparison to this one. This was, in no uncertain terms, an expletive redacted load of goblins.
“That’s … troubling.”
“Indeed,” said Sloot, who was nearly as troubled by the fact that Vlad didn’t appear winded. He was exhausted just watching her.
All of a sudden, she was through. The stars of the night sky appeared through the dissipating cloud of hammered goblins. Sloot floated out into the clearing, but Vlad turned and stood her ground against the goblins that were still swarming all around her.
“The wizards!” shouted Sloot, wheeling around in search of imminent danger.
“What wizards?”
“The ones firing up at the portal,” cried Sloot. “They turned on you when you jumped, surely they’re—”
“Dead,” said Franka. She was completely drenched in blood, kneeling on the ground a few feet away. At least she had the courtesy to seem winded from the effort.
“Well, that’s a relief,” said Sloot, who didn’t generally approve of mass murder, but perhaps being dead himself had diluted the associated horror. “Wait, where’s Myrtle?”
Franka pointed up toward the portal. The congress of goblins was still climbing atop each other, forming a horrid sort of mountain, its peak reaching for the entrance to the tower. Myrtle flapped her wings just above the peak, her razor-sharp claws dispatching goblins with every swipe.
“Your Dominance,” shouted Franka, “we have to hurry! The goblins will not stray from the pile, you may disengage in safety!”
“Never!” shouted Vlad. “Retreat is for cowards and weaklings! I have never stooped so low, and I shall not start now!”
Sloot said a swear word, reasoning that one more goblin wasn’t going to amount to much bother in the aggregate.
“It’s not retreating,” said Sloot, pointing toward the ring of stones. “That’s the real fight, over there! The more powerful enemy!”
“You make a good point,” said Vlad, “but I can’t turn my back on the enemy in front of me. It could take half an hour or more to dispatch this horde!”
“Half an hour?”
“Forty-five minutes, perhaps.”
As impressive as Vlad’s estimate was, it didn’t account for the fact that they were dispatching goblins by the score, but the pile didn’t seem to get any smaller. Sloot couldn’t see where they were all coming from, but assumed there was an elite cadre of linguists hidden away nearby, swearing up a storm. They probably even knew the correct pronunciation of “cadre” without having to think about it.
Sloot looked over to the ring of stones and the sickly green glow that cast from within it. He heard a cackling that chilled him to his very core, one that required the years of practice that only a necromancer would have time to put in.
Gregor.
Vlad was still close enough to the pile that a few goblins would charge her at a time, effectively preventing her from getting on with things that desperately needed getting on with.
Franka’s fists shook in frustration. “Do something!”
Sloot sighed. He didn’t question that she was talking to him. He had an innate sense that told him to assume orders barked in his presence were meant for him. He cringed as he floated in front of Vlad, shouting “here, goblins! Come listen to all of the worst swear words I know!”
He shouted the one that starts with a “W” and calls one’s least favorite uncle’s hygiene into question. Then he yelled out a sentence that used the noun, adjective, and verb forms of the one that starts with a “J.” That one really got the goblins’ attention. They seemed to forget about Vlad altogether and start chasing after Sloot, who floated off in the opposite direction as quickly as he could, shouting the one that rhymes with “custard” over and over again, even though it made absolutely no sense in context.
It worked! Sloot hazarded a glance over his shoulder, and beyond the bloodthirsty congressional committee that was hot on his heels, he saw Vlad and Franka sprinting toward the circle of stones. He only hoped they’d get there in time.
Well, that wasn’t exactly true. While he did hope for that, he applied most of his hope of finding some means of losing his pursuers before they caught up with him. His level of panic was too high in the moment to allow any brutally obvious revelations past the velvet rope of realization.
He eventually managed it by turning and plunging into the greater congressional pile. He didn’t bother checking, but assumed that his pursuers followed along and re-assimilated into the mass. The feeling of relief from having plunged himself, once again, into the teeming mass of goblins quickly wore off. He floated upward and exited through the top of the pile, not far from Myrtle.
“Myrtle!” he shouted.
“Sloot! What’s happened to Vlad?”
“She and Franka are going to deal with the castle.”
“That’s good,” she said, then grunted with the effort of dispatching another pair of goblins with her wicked claws. “I can’t keep this up forever. We’re going to have to close the portal!”
“I thought the goblins couldn’t leave the Old Country!”
“Not usually,” said Myrtle, “but Nicoleta thinks portals might be an exception. Take that!” Another three goblins vanished in puffs of smoke. “I really wish I had my broom right now.” Her claws were doing an impressive job, but nothing ripped through goblins like a well-made broom.
“Things aren’t going well down there,” shouted Roman. He was leaning through the portal, watching the castle through an old brass spyglass. “I don’t know if Vlad will be able to get to Gregor before he finishes the spell!”
“There’s still a chance,” shouted Nicoleta. “Bartleby, open the Astrogrammaton to the chapter on inescapable blackness. I think there’s a spell in there you could manage. Hurry, we only have a few minutes!”
“Less than that,” yelled Myrtle. Her claws reduced another goblin to shadow. She was ripping through them with ferocious efficiency, but it wasn’t enough. The goblins just kept coming. There were far more than Myrtle, Roman, and Bartleby combined could ever overcome, even if they wielded two brooms apiece.
“We’re going to have to close the portal!” shouted Myrtle.
“Sloot!” yelled Nicoleta. “If Vlad kills Gregor in time, the ritual might fizzle out. You have to
tell her!”
“But what if—”
“Go! If we have to close the portal before Bartleby finishes this spell, we’ll lose our only chance!”
Sloot spared a glance at Myrtle as he turned, but she was far too busy slaughtering goblins to meet it. Of all the things that could have interfered with his romantic endeavors, Sloot couldn’t have foreseen this one in particular. If Myrtle had, she hadn’t told him about it.
He floated as quickly as he could over the carnage of the battlefield, past the colossal goblin congress piling itself ever skyward, the corpses of the wizards that Myrtle and Franka had killed, and coming at last to what seemed to be an enormous magical shield surrounding the circle of stones.
“Curse their magic,” bellowed Vlad. “Cowards! Dispel this shield and meet me with honor!”
“You’re wasting your time,” said Franka. She sat patiently on the ground, legs folded and back straight. Sloot had seen Bartleby do that before, when he was trying to teach Willie meditation. It looked terribly uncomfortable. Then again, he’d never bothered with the pursuit of good posture. In accounting, bad posture was the mark of a man who’d slaved over his ledgers properly.
“Can you pass through it?”
“Who, me?” asked Sloot.
“Of course, you!” Vlad growled with all of the fury and adrenaline that one would expect of a warrior who trained for combat from dawn to dusk. “Get in there and possess that necromancer!”
“I wouldn’t know how to—”
“Go!”
Given the choice of charging headlong through a magical shield that may or may not be harmful to disembodied spirits, or further vexing the most skilled warrior that history has ever seen, Sloot enthusiastically opted for the former. As luck would have it, the shield neither impeded nor obliterated him. It did leave him with the psychic equivalent of a headache, which was worrisome, but only a bit. There had been a time, before misfortune got Sloot promoted out of the counting house, when “only a bit worrisome” would have eventually risen to the top of his queue of things needing fretting over. These days, it didn’t stand a chance.