
Текст книги "Brown River Queen"
Автор книги: Frank Tuttle
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 14 страниц)
“I believe I shall retire for the evening,” said the Regent. He offered his creature his arm, and she took it, still smiling that deadly small smile.
They walked through the dancers, untouched.
Stitches pulled me and Darla away from the music box.
I am unable to determine its method of selection,she began. But given time-
Screams arose from our right, and a small band of revelers who had taken refuge behind a makeshift barricade of tables and gambling machines broke into sudden panicked flight past us.
Mama cussed and raised her cleaver. Stitches spun her staff, causing it to shine a bright blood red and emit a high-pitched whine.
Evis moved to stand at my side. He held an enormous double-barreled rifle, to which a light was attached. He aimed it toward the far wall.
I squinted, but saw nothing save for shadow.
Mama Hog followed the light too, and cussed.
“Don’t look,” she shrieked. “Don’t nobody look!”
I looked. It was just a shadow in a roomful of shadows. Darker, perhaps.
Deeper.
My mother appeared, in the same threadbare apron she’d worn, I supposed, every day of her life.
She waved and smiled. I’d taken a step before I realized what I was doing, before I remembered burying Mom in a poor man’s boneyard on a rainy day in winter.
Mama stamped hard on my foot.
“Dammit, I told you not to look!”
I turned away, more angry than afraid.
Darla turned to face me, tears in her eyes. I’ve never asked who she saw. She’s never told.
Screams sounded. I glanced that way, saw a man in an old Army dress uniform being dragged into the shadow by a dozen pairs of emaciated hands.
When he reached the place where the wall should have been, his screams simply ceased, and we faced nothing but shadow once again.
An ethereal interface,said Stitches. One born of blood sacrifice.
“What the hell? I don’t see any corpses.”
I too am puzzled. But I estimate at least ten deaths would be required to commence the process.
I groaned. “Would they have to take place all at once?”
No. But we have not had ten fatalities all evening, by my count.
“The accidents during the Queen’sconstruction. The curse. Damned if it wasn’t a curse after all.”
Our internal investigation revealed no foul play in any of the accidents.
“We can ponder that later.” Evis motioned toward the shadow. “If it’s what I think it is, where does it lead?”
“Leads to Hell itself,” muttered Mama. She charged suddenly toward the shadow, tackling a woman in waiter’s garb before she could get close.
I joined her, dragging the woman back though she fought and begged.
Darla threw a glass of water in the woman’s face when we wrestled her back to the stage. Evis ordered a pair of halfdead to take her to her room.
“The other corpse,” I managed, winded after my struggle with the woman. “She’ll probably rise too.”
“Already has,” replied Evis, who kept his eyes on the shadow. “Guards heard her banging around in the closet where they’d stashed the body.”
“They go nuts too?”
Evis shook his head. “Hardly. They nailed the door shut without opening it. They knew dead when they saw it.”
“Bright lads.”
Evis nodded. “What do you think would happen if I laid this rifle barrel right against that music box and pulled the trigger?”
“Not a damned thing.”
Evis sighed. “I hate it when you’re right, Markhat. Didn’t scratch the thing. Got any ideas?”
“One crisis at a time.” I gestured toward the shadow. “What about putting a dozen of your men in a half circle around that with their backs to it? To keep people from wandering too close?”
He barked orders. Halfdead took their places, horror at their backs. If any of them were fearful they didn’t let it show.
One drunk wobbled up, shouting to someone only he could see and trying to sidle past. He got a rifle butt to his face for his trouble. A waiter grabbed him by one leg and dragged him off to safety.
I caught Darla staring at the shadowed place again. “No,” she said before I could ask the question. “I’m not looking into it. Just at it. And honey, I believe it’s getting larger, by the minute.”
Evis glanced at Stitches. “Is it?”
Stitches aimed her glass staff that way. The metal vanes whirled.
Yes. Its boundaries are moving. I may be able to slow it down. But I cannot halt its expansion entirely.
A bony hand emerged from the dark, groping blindly about. Another joined it, grasping at empty air with fingers that dropped flakes of desiccated flesh.
Stitches hurled a sizzling arc of crackling light full into the shadow, right over the heads of the Avalante soldiers. The skeletal hands withdrew but the darkness remained.
One of Evis’s halfdead soldiers broke from his post about the shadow, walking jerkily toward us, as though injured or ill. His rifle fell from his grasp as he drew near.
“Damn,” said Mama. “Didn’t think I’d see no halfdead get called to dance.”
Evis opened his mouth to protest, but the halfdead brushed past us, his dead eyes wide and dry, his mouth open as if trying to speak.
He took his place amid the other dancers, and began to spin and turn.
“That isn’t possible,” said Evis.
I beg to differ.Stitches stared, eyes moving back and forth like those of a dreamer, behind her tight-sewn eyelids.
The capture of dancers is increasing in frequency, at a rate that appears commensurate with the expansion of the shadow.
“So we can either be grabbed by whatever is in the dark, or be forced to dance until our legs wear down to stumps, is that it?”
Not entirely. That which lies beyond the shadow is beginning to emerge. In doing so, it is inducing small but fundamental changes to the nature of reality within theQueen’s shield.
“The air feels funny,” agreed Mama with a frown. “So somethin’ is aimin’ to choke us out?”
It appears so. If I am correct, the changes exerted by the shadow will soon render our reality compatible with that which lies beyond.
“Which lets them just stroll out and snack on the dancers,” I said.
Stitches nodded. Unless I collapse the shield.
“Doing that leaves us open to an ambush by Hag Mary and her pals,” said Evis. “Someone has thought of everything.”
A new pair of skeletal hands appeared from the growing shadow. Evis barked a command, and his ring of foot soldiers turned and fired.
Finger-bones shattered and flew.
Something in the dark howled with laughter.
A door slammed. I heard shouts, arguing, a man’s voiced, raised and furious, and a woman’s, soft but stern.
Lady Rondalee herself took the stage.
“The band can’t stop playing,” she said to Evis. “Am I right that those folks can’t stop dancing?”
Evis nodded. “You should get to your room,” he said. “It isn’t safe here.”
Lady Rondalee laughed. “Child, it’s not safe anywhere on the Brown River tonight. But I was hired to sing and sing I shall. Maybe I can do some good that way. Ease these poor souls’ pain.”
Evis frowned. Mama spoke before he could.
“I reckon we all best be doin’ whatever we can, and no mistake,” she said. “If’n you knows the risk.”
“All too well.” The Lady Rondalee smiled down at Mama. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Hog.”
“Likewise, Lady of Bel Loit.”
And the Lady Rondalee began to sing.
She didn’t have music. The musicians were playing, all right, in that their hands were moving and they were making noise, but it was just noise now-tooting and twanging and discordant strumming.
The Lady Rondalee didn’t need music. She carried her own deep down in her voice, and when she sang the dancers slowed and the musicians slumped, panting and sweating, but able to steal just a moment of precious rest.
Evis gave orders. In a moment, the recorded music began to play, and the Lady used it, her voice soaring and soothing with the foreign, melancholy tune.
“She’s buyin’ us some time,” said Mama, glaring at the music box. From the look on her face, I could tell she was weighing the risk of taking one last spiteful swipe at it. “We’d best be about puttin’ it to good use.”
Darla dodged out of the way of a new dancer. “Mama, how is she doing that? Slowing them down, I mean?”
“Don’t know. They got their own magic, down Bel Loit way. I’ve heard the name Rondalee. They say she can sing up hexes like nobody’s business.”
On stage, the Lady Rondalee must have heard, because she bowed and smiled, never missing a beat.
I hauled Darla away from the weary dancers and back to our makeshift cauldron, Mama and Evis and Stitches in tow.
Armed halfdead prowled the deserted casino. More skeletal arms began to emerge from the dark. Evis forbade his men from wasting ammunition by firing on them. He held a quick conference with a trio of black-shirted day folk, and they hurried toward the main doors and out into the night.
“Let’s get this done,” said Evis, glaring at our boiling stew pot. “Stitches, Mama, how much longer?”
Another hour, perhaps an hour and ten.
Mama dropped to her haunches and started poking at her pile of trinkets and herbs. “‘Bout the same, I reckon.”
Another vacant-eyed reveler raised a ruckus by tangling with the halfdead trying to keep people away from the stricken dancers. The new dancer broke free and started twirling while the halfdead watched helplessly.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “What if I throw yonder music box into the shadow?”
“How you reckon on movin’ it at all?” Mama shook her shaggy head. “I tell ye, boy, it might as well be bolted to the floor.”
“Mama. That rope that got you here. Still got it?”
Mama nodded. “Right here in my sack.” She wanted to ask me what made me think a banshee-hair rope would be able to pull the music box when she couldn’t budge it, but she was wise enough not to ask it aloud.
I was glad. Because I didn’t have an answer. For all I knew a rope woven with Buttercup’s golden locks wouldn’t do a damned thing against a magical item of such potency, but then again I doubted even a summer-born Elf suspected a banshee was nearby.
“I need it, if it’s handy.”
“If it please ye.” Mama rummaged in her burlap sack, withdrew a number of ragged dried birds, and finally produced a tangle of what I first took for twine.
She pitched it to me.
“You call this a rope?” It was as thick as a pencil and already beginning to unravel here and there.
“At two pence a foot, you’re damn right I call it a rope,” said Mama. “I weren’t aimin’ to pull no millstones.”
I sat and started untangling the mess. Mama went back to her piles, muttering all the while.
“Angels and horses,” said Evis, lifting his weapon. “Stitches, can you spare a moment?”
The darkness on the wall disgorged a human skeleton-whole, complete, and animated. It bore a long, curved sword, and managed to take half a dozen tentative steps toward the nearest of the Avalante guards before an invisible barrier halted its advance.
Another bony revenant stepped from the shadow, and another, until a dozen of them pressed against a wall we couldn’t see.
Elemental constructs,said Stitches. I presume they are the vanguard for more sophisticated entities which cannot yet exist in our world.She sounded almost disappointed at the pronouncement . Still. The volume of influence is expanding more rapidly than I expected.
“If we shoot them, will they fall?”
Yes, if they suffer sufficient structural degradation. Make your shots count. Their numbers could range from finite but uncountable, to practical infinity.
Evis barked an order. Rifles cracked. Bones splintered and skeletons fell.
Immediately, more began to march out of the dark. This time, they advanced half a step farther than their now-broken brethren.
A new pair of dancers lurched toward the stage. Evis’s men made no move to stop them. While I watched, another halfdead joined the dancers, his black cloak rendering him nearly invisible as he moved.
Another volley of rifles sounded, and another wave of bones fell, only to be replaced by twice their number. I fought off the urge to open fire myself, and concentrated on unraveling Mama’s damp tangle of banshee-hair rope.
Two of the three men Evis sent outside came racing back. One was bleeding from a chest wound. The other was wrapping his bloody hand with a towel while he whispered to Evis.
I saw it in his eyes before he could speak. “I sent them to the piston deck,” he said as they left to tend their wounds. “The wheelhouse is gone. Full of that.” Evis pointed to the shadow. “Can’t get below decks either. Shadows and bone-men where the hatch used to be.”
The Queen’spistons still beat beneath my feet. I could hear the wet slap of her wheel faint above the music.
“We’re still moving.”
“She was built to be unstoppable.” Evis fired, causing Mama to cuss and a skeleton man’s skull to explode. “Damn it, Markhat. Is this stew-pot and that contraption the best we’ve got?”
“No.” I’d been waiting for the right moment and decided this one was as good as any. There were people milling about. The odds that one of them was our Elf probably wouldn’t be improved by waiting. “We’ve got this.”
I pulled the false huldra out of my pocket and held it up for all to see.
Mama sprang to her feet, yelling and cussing. Evis took a step back, genuinely startled.
The last time I’d held a huldra-the real one-I’d nearly killed Evis and Mama both.
“Damn, boy, have you lost your mind?” Mama reached into her bag with both hands and pulled out dried, ragged bird-corpses by the handful. “You know that cursed thing will eat you alive!”
“I was told you destroyed it,” said Evis. “I was told it was gone forever.”
“It’s the only way, Mama.” I lowered the thing. Everyone on the floor had seen and all were listening. “Even it might not be enough by itself. But with this rig and Stitches’s help, I’m going to add Elf meat to my stew-pot by sunrise. Wait and see.”
Mama shook birds at me and muttered softly. Evis kept his rifle aimed at the floor, but I could almost see him trying to decide how quickly he could bring it to bear if I showed signs of being taken by the huldra.
Darla made a remarkable good show of trying to grab the thing. When I resisted, she pretended to weep, keeping her fists balled over her eyes so no one would notice the lack of tears.
“You’ve all got things to do,” I said. “What’s done is done. Let’s get back to work.”
I slipped the tortoise shell back into my pocket.
Well played,said Stitches in her secret whisper. I knew you would find a use for it.
I didn’t reply.
The last time I’d walked with the huldra, I’d become a giant, my eyes far above the rooftops and the spires and the smoke-belching stacks of the crematoriums and the foundries. As I’d walked, the huldra had whispered things to me, things I could only now recall as vague, dreamlike memories.
I’d been offered power. Been shown dark wonders. I’d been able to see into the spaces between shadow and light, and the secret things I’d seen within had allowed me to not just work magic, but bend it to my will.
As I let go of the fake huldra, a small greedy part of me wished for that power again, if only for an instant, and the hair on the back of my neck rose at the faint memory of having such a thing in my grasp.
Mama cussed and rose to her feet, her cleaver appearing in her hand.
Evis dropped his rifle.
I turned. Darla caught my elbow, real tears forming in her eyes.
Walking down the grand staircase, her movements jerky and halting, came Gertriss.
Her stare was vacant. Her mouth moved, but no words came out.
Buttercup skipped along beside her, a doll in each hand, holding them up to Gertriss, waving them about her, trying to make her play.
Gertriss reached the bottom of the stairs and made for the rest of the dancers.
“Oh hell no,” said Mama, starting off after her. “Not my kin.”
There is nothing you can do for her, save keep working.
Evis charged after, unarmed.
Three halfdead responded to Evis and his orders to keep Gertriss from joining the dance. Two took an arm each. The third tried to wrap his arms around her knees and hold her still.
She dragged them all, one halting step at a time.
Darla put her head on my chest.
“Buttercup,” I called. Instantly, the tiny banshee appeared before me, her face somber, her dolls hanging still at her side.
I pushed Buttercup into Darla’s arms. “Tend the child,” I said. Darla looked up at me, hurt.
He must pretend to be falling under the huldra’s influence,said Stitches. It must seem real.
Darla pulled away.
I thought back to the times I’d actually held a huldra, to the power I’d felt rushing through my soul.
“I shall make me a manikin of this Elf’s skin and bones,” I said aloud. “I shall take a bite of his heart before it is stilled.”
Mama caught up to Gertriss and had no more luck than the vampires. Gertriss joined the expanding ring of dancers, spinning in slow circles to Lady Rondalee’s nameless song.
Angels above, bear me down this here river,
Bear me safe over snag and shoal,
Angels above, from heartache deliver,
Angels bear me safe and Angels spare my soul
Mama let go of Gertriss and screamed as she danced away.
Chapter Fourteen
It took five halfdead to wrestle Evis away from Gertriss.
One of them wound up with a broken arm. Evis had a swollen nose and a black right eye. I don’t think he felt either injury.
Mama wasn’t faring much better. She’d gone after the music box again, this time favoring a rifle she’d snatched from the floor. Mama had no idea how to fire it but she put the butt to good use, smashing away at the music box until the stock broke. She then proceeded to use the steel barrel as a club. Neither of the tiny mechanical dancers suffered in the least.
In the end, Mama exhausted herself and returned to her pile of herbs, where she burst into great hooting sobs of crying.
Buttercup dashed to her side, hugging her wordlessly, rocking with her until she fell silent. All the while, the banshee looked up at me expectantly.
I stirred the damned useless stew-pot and seethed.
The ranks of skeletons waiting for the barrier to fall now numbered eighteen deep. Evis absently ordered his men to cut them down. They did, this time with assistance from the rotating rapid-fire horrors that shot out through the shield earlier. Spent cartridges rolled across the casino floor. Bone-men fell. More rattled up to take their places.
“Sixty-two,” whispered Darla, not looking at me. “Dancers, that is.”
Fourteen dance in their locked rooms,added Stitches.
“That is not entirely helpful,” I noted. I rose. Huldra or no, Elf or no, I’d had enough sitting there stirring the world’s worst soup while my junior partner danced to a cursed trinket’s tune and my best friend died a second time from sheer grief.
Darla’s breath caught in her chest and she moved away from me. I looked around, saw Buttercup running, laying the rope I’d finally untangled out in a circle around us.
It was a game Mama had taught her when we first took Buttercup in. Run and lay string on the floor, in this door and out another. We’d reel it in, her screeching and giggling, until we caught her up in a hug.
Hey, it kept her from jumping through walls.
“Buttercup!” I bellowed. “Stop that.”
The banshee laughed and scampered on. I caught up the end of the rope and tugged, halting Buttercup long enough for Darla to scoop her up.
“Honey,” said Darla, her eyes wary as I gathered up the banshee-hair rope. “What are you planning to do?”
“I’m calling off the dance.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Stitches to try and get the Regent’s lady friend to help?”
“I’m tired of waiting for the Regent to pry himself away from his game of whist. I’m going to see if I can tie this rope around the music box and pull it close to the shadow. We’ll see how the bone-men like dancing. Evis, will you keep everyone back?”
He just nodded.
I stomped away while Darla had her hands full. Mama looked up as I passed.
“It ain’t a half-bad idea, boy,” she said. “You ought to let me do it, though. I’m protected from all manner of hex-craft.”
“Not this time, Mama, but thanks for the offer.”
The halfdead parted to let me through, and I zigged and zagged between sweat-soaked dancers. Gertriss saw me as she passed, and her eyes went instantly wide, though she could not bring herself to speak. The Lady Rondalee kept singing, her voice showing no signs of strain.
Gertriss spun away.
“If you’ve got any river magic to spare, I’m about to need it,” I shouted to the stage.
The Lady smiled and started a new song.
Mean ol’ love, she broke my heart,
though I was always true,
Mean ol’ love, she broke my heart,
and now she’s comin’ for you…
I kicked a chair out of my way and put a small loop in the end of the rope. My intention was to slide the rope over and around the music box and hope some magical quality in Buttercup’s banshee hair would allow the rope to take hold. Then I’d drag the damned thing close enough to chuck it as far back in the shadow-realm as I could throw.
The miniature dancers circled the lid, bowing and spinning. I could barely hear the tinkling of the music box as it played.
“This isn’t your world,” I said, holding the rope just above the box and adjusting the diameter of the loop. “You don’t belong here and these people don’t belong to you. Now let go, damn you.”
I dropped the rope and yanked it tight.
Damned if the box didn’t jerk halfway off the table.
I pulled. The box moved. Its apparent weight was far in excess of what it should have been, as though it were twice its size and full of lead, but it moved.
The halfdead scattered about me and began to shout. I turned and barely dodged a blow from a man dressed in the male toy dancer’s elaborate costume.
A trio of shots rang out. Puffs of lace and velvet blew off the man’s waistcoat. Another fusillade of rifle fire sounded, bullets whizzing a hand’s breadth from my face, and I managed to step away from a slashing blade just as the female dancer, now full-size and furious, charged at my back.
If she was struck, she didn’t show it. Neither did her partner, who also failed to bleed or fall.
Halfdead flew past, converging on the dancers, swords flashing, rifle butts rising and falling. Both dancers went down flailing, but down they went.
More halfdead arrived. The dancers never made a sound. As they lost clothes to the struggle I saw complicated metal workings appear-gears and cogs and levers turning uselessly against the ferocity of two dozen determined halfdead.
I gave the rope a mighty heave and the music box, still playing, crashed to the deck.
The tiny dancers still danced, although the automatons lay smashed and still on the floor.
I heaved and struggled. The box slid across the carpet, leaving gashes in its wake. The thin rope cut into my palms, and I marveled at its strength.
Evis appeared at my side, took hold of the banshee-hair rope, and dragged the cursed box easily. I matched his pace until we reached the ranks of grinning skeletons, who clacked their dry teeth and smacked their long swords against their hip-bones in greeting.
“Cut them down,” shouted Evis. He smiled for the first time all night. “Cut them down and keep firing. We’re going in.”
The guns erupted with smoke and thunder. Halfdead closed ranks around us, adding rifle fire to the noise. Darla came to my side and emptied her gun into the dark.
The last of the bone-men fell.
Stitches strode up, hood thrown back, her ruined eyes aimed right at the shadow. She produced a handful of what looked like dust and pitched it out over the shattered heaps of bones.
Nothing happened, but she seemed to be waiting. A pair of fresh skeletons stepped out of the shadow and were brought down before they took another step.
Evis bent, took the music box in both hands, and lifted it.
I’d never seen a halfdead strain with exertion before. Evis clenched his jaw and his lips curled back and I could hear vampire joints popping and creaking against the effort.
But he picked the thing up, and held it aloft, and took a pair of steps forward.
Bones crunched beneath his boots. I followed, Toadsticker at the ready.
Hurry,said Stitches. They are massing beyond the dark.
“Dance, you bastards,” growled Evis. He bent his knees and bunched and threw the box forward right into the heart of the shadow.
The shadow exploded, bursting with harsh white light.
In that instant, I saw through the shadow and the Queen’shull. Saw through to somewhere else-somewhere blasted and ruined and savaged. Nightmares roamed there, by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands. The ranks of the bone-men were the least of them.
Before the intensity of the light blinded me, I saw great vast, oily bulks writhing and shuffling, all making their way toward us. Some crawled. Some walked on legs that towered up far and away into the sky. Some oozed and slithered and rolled.
But all were bearing down on us, waiting for the darkness to take root and admit them.
I reached out, grabbed what I hoped was Evis, and yanked him back. I heard Darla shouting as from a great distance. Something out in the dark bellowed and something answered with a roar, and then hands fell upon me and hauled me out of the shadow.
I blinked, stumbling, bones crunching with every step. Darla was shouting at me, but my ears were ringing and I couldn’t make out her words.
Someone pushed a chair under me. I sat, rubbing my eyes, waiting for the bell in my ears to stop its damned pealing.
When I could see faces through the after-images left by the light, I knew we’d failed.
Darla was fighting back tears. Mama was muttering cuss words and laying into her blunted cleaver with a whetstone. Evis sat, head bowed, unmoving.
I could just make out the shapes of the ensorcelled dancers, still spinning and bowing. One went limp as I watched, but could not fall. Instead his body bumped and swayed, as though held upright by a rope around his neck.
“Maybe it just takes time,” I said, barely able to hear my own words.
You may have had some effect. The number of constructs emerging is reduced. The rate of expansion is slowed.
I glanced that way. Ranks of bone-men grinned back. If their numbers were reduced I couldn’t see it.
Evis raised his face.
“You have a huldra,” he said to me. “Why didn’t you use it?”
“Evis. You know I can’t control it.”
His face fell.
“It isn’t real, is it? Damn you, Markhat. That was our only hope.”
“We’re not done yet.” I looked around. No one but Darla and Mama and Stitches was close enough to hear. “Not yet.”
He had no reply.
“Stitches. Did you see anything in the shadow that might help?”
I believe it was a vast cavern, location unknown. Probably under the control of Hag Mary. A number of those creatures were quite ancient.
“Fascinating. Evis, how much ammunition do we have for those rapid-firing guns?”
But Evis was gone, vampire-quick and vampire-quiet.
He was halfway to the dancers before any of us could even stand.
I shouted. The halfdead ringing the dancers looked my way, but Evis waved them aside. I ran, knowing I’d never catch up.
They let me through. I found Evis sprinting beside Gertriss, the banshee-hair rope in his hands.
I backed off.
“Good idea,” I said. Evis nodded, put himself in front of her, and tossed a loop of rope around her.
She danced on, unslowed.
Evis let the rope drop from his hands. I caught up with him and stood beside him as we watched her go.
The first dancer to die flopped past. All the dancers were drooping. Lady Rondalee’s voice was hoarse and beginning to falter.
“You have the key,” said Evis. “Take Mama and Darla and Buttercup. There’s room for Stitches too, if you can convince her to go.”
“We’re not dead yet.”
“I am. I’ve been dead for years. I was just beginning to live again. Now I’ve got no reason. Fare thee well, Markhat. We had some good times, didn’t we?”
And before I could stop him, he darted away.
Before I could take even a pair of useless steps, he’d found Gertriss.
Before I could shout, he put his hands in hers and fell into step with her.
His dead white eyes didn’t glaze, didn’t close, but I saw them lose their focus.
And then they danced away.
Mama snuffled and mopped at her face. I hadn’t seen her come up.
“Reckon I might have been wrong about that one,” she said, gathering up her useless rope. “Might be a heart left in there after all.”
Gertriss rested her head on his shoulder.
“He give up, boy. You an’ me, we ain’t got that luxury.”
“He didn’t give up, Mama.” I looked away. “He chose how he wanted to die.”
“Same damned thing. Now unless you are figurin’ on takin’ up dancin’, we still got people on this boat. You comin’?”
I followed. There didn’t seem to be anything else left to do.
Darla and Stitches met us, Darla with hugs and Stitches with a cursory nod from behind her makeshift tower of bubbling vessels and sparking rods.
I am nearly done.
Darla let go of me reluctantly. I took a deep breath.
“Right. Mama, get ready to shake your birds. Stitches, I’m going to hold the huldra in one hand and Toadsticker in the other, and when I give you the sign, we light this thing up. Shortly after that we’ll know who’s Elf and who is not. Got it?”
Understood.
Buttercup scampered past, laying down her rope in a circle around us. Mama was busy tending her flock of dead birds. Darla was reloading. Stitches was putting the finishing touches on a complex device we both knew was a fraud and a lie.
“Not the time for games, honey,” I said. “Come back here.”
Buttercup giggled and scampered off.
Dutson appeared, a tray laden with beer bottles in his hand. I’d caught a glimpse of him in the fray with the construct dancers. He was bleeding from a cut on his forehead and his dinner jacket was torn, but his bearing suggested we were all merely enjoying another fine meal on another fine evening.
He nodded at me and gave me his customary ghost of a smile.
And then he stepped over Buttercup’s rope.
It wasn’t much. Just a shimmer, if you will. The barest flickering, the hint of a blur, as though Dutson stepped in front of hot air rising over a road. His features distorted-for a fraction of a heartbeat-showing as something with the basic shape and features of a man in late middle age that wasn’t a man at all.
Buttercup appeared at my side, slipped her tiny hand in mine, and began to howl.
Dutson dropped his tray. I brought my gun to bear. Buttercup’s howl rose up and filled the Queen, and before Dutson could move, Buttercup raised her free hand, pointing at him.