* * *
“How come you think I imagined it?” I demanded. Goblin and I were approaching the Dark Horse. We were not needed at the compound. Elmo could handle all that. And, when the temple girl proved not to be Tides Elba, he could be the man who had to get started planning out how to find the real thing.
“Because I got a great view of the southern sky.” He pointed.
From out of the distance, unhurried, a flying carpet headed across town, fifty feet above the rooftops. Two riders were visible. One wore a floppy black hat.
So. Limper went to Utbank to check up on One-Eye, then brought him and the Third back, unconvinced that the Old Man had sent them away because One-Eye’s greed was complicating matters.
“All right. Must’ve been my guilty conscience. Let’s reward ourselves for work well done with Master Zhorab’s fine ale.”
Goblin said, “It is earlier than is my custom but in honor of our success I will join you, sir.”
We entered. The interior of the Dark Horse exactly reflected its exterior. There were no Company brothers outside, drinking or playing tonk. There were none inside, either.
In fact, there was no one behind the bar.
Goblin observed, “Nobody’s home. Let’s get back there and…”
Markeg Zhorab materialized. Goblin said, “Hello, magic man. We’ve done a hard day’s work. Beer is in order.”
Zhorab drew two mugs while eying us with unnerving intensity. “Did you catch who you were after?” He was incredibly tense.
“We did. Why does that mean anything to you?”
Zhorab raised a finger in a “wait one” gesture. He dug out the cash box he thought was secret but was not to any sharp-eyed regular. He looked around furtively while fumbling it open. He produced a ragged deck.
“My cards.” Last seen in the hands of Corey and his pals. “Where did you get those?”
“Goblin told me to hold on to them till you arrested the person the Taken came to collect.”
Goblin and I exchanged blank looks.
“Oh. It’s not really the cards.” He spread the deck across the bar, hand shaking, watching the door like he expected doom to thunder through.
Goblin asked, “You haven’t sold us out to somebody, have you?”
“Huh? Oh! No! Never!”
“Then how come this place is so empty? How come you’re so nervous?”
I said, “It’s empty because everybody is out at the compound. Hello.” I plucked a piece of parchment from amongst the scattered cards.
I unfolded it.
I stared.
I started shaking. Memories buried monstrously deep gurgled to the surface. “Goblin. Check this out.”
He started shaking, too.
Zhorab asked, “I did it right?”
I pushed a silver piece across. “You did it perfectly.” I found the copy, too. “Just one more step. You probably had the forger make an extra copy. We want that, too.”
Zhorab wanted to lie but desisted after one look into Goblin’s eyes. “It’ll take a little while.”
I put a second coin on the bar, with an ugly black knife as a companion. The knife was not special but looked like it ought to be.
Zhorab gulped, nodded, vanished.
Goblin observed, “He gave that up pretty easy.”
“Probably has more than one copy.”
“You want them all?”
“I don’t mind some extras floating around and maybe getting back to the Tower someday.”
“Your honey would run our smelly friend through the reeducation process again.”
I shuddered. I had had my own brush with the Eye. Everything inside me had been exposed had the Lady cared to look. It had been her way of getting to know me. What the Limper would endure would be a hundred times worse, but never fatal. He was too useful—when he confined himself to being an extension of the Lady’s will.
Zhorab returned. He gave me another folded parchment. I sheathed my knife. “We have to go. Be ready for a big rush later.”
We encountered Hagop halfway to the compound. “There you are. The Captain sent me to get you guys. He wants Goblin to connect with the Tower so the Lady will know we got the girl, in perfect condition, before the Limper takes her and heads out.”
“Shit.” Goblin looked back, considering making a run for it.
It had been a while since he had made direct contact. He did not want to suffer that again.
I said, “It must be important if he’s willing to put you through that.”
Hagop said, “He wants to make sure she knows. He don’t trust the Limper.”
“Who would?” And, “The temple girl really is Tides Elba?”
“She don’t deny it. She claims she’s no Rebel or Resurrectionist, though. She’s got the girl magic, majorly.”
Goblin asked, “Croaker, it ever feel like everybody knows more than you do?”
“Every damned day since I joined this chickenshit outfit. Hagop. Take this. First chance you get, plant it back where you found it.”
He took the folded parchment. “This isn’t the one I gave you.”
* * *
The Captain was behind his table. Tides Elba sat on one of his rude chairs, wrists and ankles in light fetters. She looked emotionally past the point where she could not believe that this was happening. A torc had been placed around her neck, of the sort used to manage captured sorcerers. If she used sorcery it would deliver terrible pain.
The Lady must have seen something way down the road. This child was sitting on the only magic she controlled right now.
The Captain scowled. “You’ve been drinking.”
“One mug, in celebration of a job well done,” Goblin replied.
“It’s not done yet. Contact the Lady. Let her know. Before the Limper finds out that we have her.”
Goblin told me, “Welcome to the mushroom club.”
The Captain said, “I don’t need you here, Croaker.”
“Of course you do. How else will I get it in the Annals right?”
He shrugged. “Move it, Goblin. You’re wasting time.”
Goblin could make contact on the spur of the moment because he had made the same connection before. Familiarity did not ease the pain. He shrieked. He fell down, gripped by a seizure. Concerned, the Captain came out from behind his table, dropped to a knee, back to the girl. “Will he be all right?”
“Make sure he doesn’t swallow his tongue.” I took the opportunity to cop a feel while slipping the folded parchment in amongst the sweet jubblies. The girl met my eye but said nothing. “Maybe he’s having trouble getting through.”
The Lady responded just as the Limper burst in, exploding the door.
A circle of embers two feet across appeared above Goblin, almost tangled in the Captain’s hair. The Lady’s beautiful face came into focus inside. Her gaze met mine. She smiled. My legs turned to gelatin.
Goblin’s seizure ended. So did the Limper’s charge.
A whisper from everywhere asked, “Is that her?”
The Captain said, “We believe so, ma’am. She fits every particular.”
The Lady winked at me. She and I were old campaign buddies. We had hunted down and killed her sister together, once upon a time.
The whisper said, “She’s striking, isn’t she?”
I nodded. Goblin and the Captain nodded. The Limper, oozing closer behind his miasmic stench, dipped his masked face in agreement. Tides Elba was striking indeed, and growing more so, employing an unconscious natural sorcery her torc did not detect.
“Every bit as much as my sister was. Who was this one’s remote grandmother, to whom she bears an uncanny resemblance.”
Different sister, I presumed. Tides Elba bore only a passing resemblance to the one that I had helped kill. I started to ask something. Needlessly. Our employer was in an expansive mood.
“Her male ancestor was my husband. He futtered anything that moved, including all my sisters and most of the female Take
n. Enough. She was about to mate with another of his descendants. Their child would have become a vessel into which the old bastard could project his soul.”
The Limper might have considered all that in whatever he had planned. The rest of us gaped, except for the girl. She did not understand. The Lady spoke a language unknown to her.
She was totally focused on what hung in the air, there, though.
She voided herself. She knew where she was going.
Something passed between the Lady and the Limper. The stinky little sorcerer bowed. He moved in on the girl, took her arm, forced her to her feet, pushed her toward the door he had wrecked.
We watched, every man wishing he could stop them, every man knowing that, if the Lady had spoken truly, Tides Elba was a threat to the whole world. She could become the port through which the hideous shadow known as the Dominator could make his return. No doubt she was sought by and beloved of every Resurrectionist cultist hoping to raise the old evil from his grave. No doubt she was the prophesied messiah of darkness.
I glanced back. The Lady was gone. The end, here, was anticlimactic, but mainly because we were out on the fringes, able to see only the local surface of the story. For the Company, the central fact would be that we had survived.
We went out and watched the Limper leave.
He shoved the girl into a sack. He sewed that shut, then secured it to his carpet with cording. Tides Elba would not evade her fate by rolling off the carpet in flight. His liftoff into the late-afternoon light seemed erratic. He seemed nervous and unhappy. He wobbled as he headed west.
I found Hagop in the shadows near where the carpet had lain. He gave me a grin and a thumbs-up. “He spotted it right away. Took it out, looked at it, and jumped like somebody hit him with a shovel.”
“He got the message, then.”
Goblin stared westward, eyes still haunted. “What a sad waste of delicious girl flesh.” Then, “Let’s round up Elmo and One-Eye and go tip a few at the Dark Horse. Elmo’s got the cards, don’t he?”
4
Once Upon a Time: The Necromancer at Home
The coach stopped outside a gap in a short palisade of sharpened stakes with fire-hardened tips. Each tip bore smears of poison. A putrefying animal carcass lay a dozen feet east of the gap, invisible in the darkness. The coachman did not smell it. He started singing an elaborate song he accompanied with complex ritual movements using what looked like a floppy feather duster. Done, he waited fifteen seconds, then urged his team forward.
The horses did as they were instructed though plainly they would rather have not.
“Have to hurry!” the coachman muttered repeatedly. “She doesn’t have much time.” But rushed as he was he did not fail to restore the lethal spells that sealed the only gap in the stockade.
The heart of the clearing, which surmounted a hill, was a low, rambling, ramshackle, cobbled-together structure. Out front of the house lay a gentle slope that had boasted few trees even before the homesteader arrived.
From behind the house came sounds of animal curiosity roused by the racket of coach and team. The conversations of swine predominated.
Two mastiffs greeted the coachman, friendly but silent. Neither had a voice.
“I got her, boys. Now we’ll see if I’m right. Now we’ll see if I’m going to change the world.”
He took the girl out of the coach carefully despite his hunger to rush. Every minute lost might mark the critical point of no return.
He took care with her but was so impatient that he left the coach and team standing, untended, a cruelty nothing like his usual self.
As he pushed through his front door he heard a remote shriek, apparently from somewhere in the sky, back toward Dusk. Something too big to be a far-off night bird ghosted across a strand of cloud turned silver by the backlighting sliver of moon.
“What in the world?”
He knew, though. One of the Ten. One of the master sorcerers enslaved by the Dominator. Why was it aloft tonight?
The body snatcher began to shiver. Shiver turned to shake as he considered the possibility that, however unlikely, the Taken was hunting him.
Why would it? He had done nothing but take a body that had been thrown away, like trash. Common law and custom were clear. Anything, once discarded, could be claimed by anyone who could use it.
Spirit lamps provided just enough light for the body snatcher to make his way safely to the back of the house, though there was little to get underfoot. He lived an austere life, focused entirely on his illegal and perilous research, outside the restraint of the lords of the Domination. He broke no law by taking a corpse but he damned himself to death every time he performed a sorcery without license from Dusk. The task he had set himself next would invite the worst that could be done to living flesh.
He stretched the girl out on a table and began.
His core craft was necromancy. He was a true master of the darker arts. He would become a true master of the darkest art of all if he succeeded here.
* * *
The girl was absurdly beautiful. The necromancer recognized that despite his indifference to it. Her only flaws were abrasions collected while descending the waste chute. He was not moved. An equally fine young male cadaver would not have moved him, either. He was not a sexual being.
He was tired. The trip to Dusk, the collecting of the body, the return home, had been physically and emotionally exhausting. But he could not rest now. Time was his enemy. If he let time go by, even his beautiful new method could not breathe fresh life into this sweet flesh.
First he must halt those processes that began immediately after death. That took only minutes. He had the equipment in place and the spells waiting.
Corruption forestalled, he spent half an hour cleansing the girl, treating her abrasions, checking her for hidden damage. He concluded that he could not have come up with a more perfect subject had he been free to pick from all the people of Dusk. This girl had taken absolutely perfect care of herself in life.
There was one troublesome matter: This girl had been exposed to serious sorcery sometime recently. Residual pollution covered her like a second skin.
Cleansing her was not part of the necromancer’s plan but cleaning her up was not difficult and did not take long.
He checked the hourglass above his worktable. Yes! This was going as smoothly as he could hope. He had an hour’s cushion on his estimates. He could afford to be extra careful going through the next several steps.
Everything progressed well till there was nothing else to do but wait for the spells, chemicals, drugs, and alchemy to finish their work.
The sun was rising when he could finally afford to rest.
Only then, as he prepared himself to lie down, did he recall having left his coach and team standing in front of the house.
5
Long Ago and Far Away: The Frightened Princess
The Lord Chamberlain abased himself before the child-woman who made others call her Princess Bathdek. Bathdek was not her real name. In the upper reaches of the Domination no one used true names, even, and especially, with one’s lovers. The Chamberlain might have overheard one of her sisters call her Credence, but that was likely a false flag, too.
The princess asked, “What news?”
“Only bad, Sublime. Only bad. But news.”
“Proceed.” Bathdek refrained from venting her spite. This worm had to believe there was hope if he crawled low enough and strove hard enough. Without hope he would give up. His driven efforts might be the best hope she had for herself.
“The soldier on sentry duty above the waste chute says there was a coach standing beside the canal at about the time that…” He chose not to push his luck with any further mention of her sister.
“Details?”
“Next to none. The coach may have been there for some time. The sentry did not hear it arrive while making that leg of his rounds. He did hear a splash. He called down a challenge. The coach left right away. That
was why he knew that there was a coach. You can’t see anything from where he was when it’s dark. I checked personally.”
“So a coach was waiting for my sister to come down the chute.”
The Lord Chamberlain had not considered the situation from that angle. “The facts would seem to fit, Your Grace.” Except, her sister was dead when … Or was she?
“Have the fools who disposed of her been punished?”
Carefully, “They have not, Sublime.” But how he wished that they had. The girl had not been dead when she fell into their hands, just entangled in a drugged dream. They had smothered her, in keeping with standing orders for the disposal of used-up virgins. “But only because the night executioner has the night off. I can send for him.”
“No. That’s good. Let them enjoy a painful reprieve. Turn out the torturers instead. See if those people were part of a kidnapping plot.”
He was sure no such plot existed but did not say so. That was exactly the sort of scheme for which Dusk was famous. He would pretend that it might be real, for his own sake.
These things never went well for the small people.
Bathdek savored the Lord Chamberlain’s terror without knowing exactly what drove it.
His fear might be one of the last amusements she would wring from life. This mess could end up claiming her and all her sisters.
He grew more insane by the week, in response to ever bleaker auguries and endless talk about comets. He might forget how much He owed, and depended upon, the Senjak family.
“Chamberlain.”
“Yes, my princess?”
“Check with the guards at the various gates. Night traffic cannot be that heavy.”
“Of course.” A step already taken. No need to irk her by telling her that, however.
Bathdek dismissed the Lord Chamberlain with a gesture. As he scooted backward she wondered if she ought not to consult her sisters. This would involve them, too. But the situation was only two hours old, still in the deeps of the night. Best not disturb their rest just yet.
Something positive might happen.
She felt no compunction about disturbing her great-uncle, the Taken known as the Howler. Insofar as she knew he had not slept during her lifetime.