Days of Magic, Nights of War Page 18

  “Well, why don’t you remount?”

  “Can’t, sir,” said another of the men, who had blood streaming down the side of his face. “The blow to the animal stops its heart. They die instantly. Half the fatalities have been of men trying to get out from under their mounts.”

  “So these creatures do the same to the men? One strike to the heart?”

  “No, sir,” said Massoff. “The bone hood swings back for a minute, and that’s when you get a glimpse of the face. Well . . . I say face; it’s just a mouth, really. All lined with teeth. That’s what kills the men, sir. The teeth. It’s horrible, sir, what these things do. I mean, it’s—”

  “Yes, Massoff, yes. I saw for myself. Clearly we have a problem. We don’t know what these creatures are, and they’re slaughtering us.”

  There was a heart-clutching cry from somewhere out in the darkness. “We also need to know what they want. What have they come for?”

  “They’re coming for me!” Kaspar said, dancing a little anticipatory jig of glee. “That’s what’s going on out there! Somebody’s finally come to set me free!”

  “They will not make it past our defenses,” said Jimothi Tarrie.

  He, the most humanoid of the tarries, was standing in a copse of witch-pyre trees, staring down the slope toward the approaching monstrosities. Behind him were thirty or forty tarrie-cats. They stood on four legs while he stood on two, but they had this in common: they were all battle-hardened warriors. “Whatever we have to do, we must stop these things from getting to the wizard’s house.” He turned to his troops. “Has anyone seen anything like this before?”

  The assembly of tarrie-cats was silent. This enemy was something new.

  “I suspected as much,” Jimothi Tarrie said. “If none of you have seen beasts like these in your many lives, I must assume such beasts did not exist until recently. Some form of perverse magic made these things.” His huge green eyes grew sad. “For those of you who are approaching your ninth life, take care out there! And you young ones, with lives to spare, throw yourselves at these things with all your strength but be aware that you could well use all of your lifetimes fighting and still not succeed in stemming the tide. So don’t be heroic for the sake of it. If you hear me call retreat, then you will retreat; do you all understand me? I sense we will have bigger battles to fight in the near future, I’m afraid to say, and I will not have you throwing your lives away unnecessarily.”

  He looked up the hill toward the dome. Kaspar Wolfswinkel’s face, vastly magnified and grotesquely distorted, was pressed against the unbroken portion of the glass.

  “On the other paw . . .” he said. “I don’t like the idea of that thing up there”—he jabbed a claw in Wolfswinkel’s direction—“escaping into the Abarat. If the whispers I hear these nights are true—and they come from all directions, telling the same terrible tales—then we cannot afford to let a villain such as Wolfswinkel go out into the islands if we can prevent it. There will be far too much trouble for the likes of him to cause.”

  “What have you heard, sir?” one of the tarrie-soldiers asked Jimothi.

  “Oh, just that the forces of the enemy grow bigger every hour. And that in the end it may be the presence of one soul on either side who will make the difference between the winning and losing of the coming war.”

  “War, sir?” said another tarrie.

  “Yes, war. And its first open conflict will be here, tonight. So acquit yourselves well, tarries. This one is for the history books!”

  There was no time for further talk.

  A noise in the darkness suddenly grew louder, and the witch-pyre trees shook till their blossoms came down in a red rain, as the enemy surged toward the company of tarries.

  From the dome Wolfswinkel watched the grisly spectacle like an eager child, talking to himself in a dozen languages—nonsensically mingled—in his enthusiasm.

  “Lookee yum! Yiefire! ’Sblud, ’sblud on das tallyman. An’ then a flick! An’ then a flack, yeah! Lookee Malanin. Tarrie—pus die, tarrie—pus die! Laodamia tee; ewe et taud. Blebs a merrio, huh? Wanton! Blebs a merrio! Sool a salis pidden. Zuberratium! Ha!”

  He beat a jubilant tattoo on the window whenever one of the tarrie-cats went down for the last time (having used up all of its nine lives), yelling the same sickening phrase over and over again:

  “Tarrie—pus die! Tarrie—pus die!”

  It wasn’t hard, even from a distance, to work out how the battle was going. It was a massacre. The soldiers who’d been defeated on the slopes retreated to swell the ranks of the tarries, but the bone-headed beasts that had done such bloody work down on the shore were quick to carve their murderous way through the ranks of the tarries. Wolfswinkel’s glee grew in direct proportion to the number of bodies, human and tarrie alike, left in the long grass.

  But the battle was not yet over. Seeing that the tree line could not be held, Jimothi Tarrie had led a small contingent of tarries away from the slaughter, intending—Wolfswinkel guessed—some kind of final surprise attack. Jimothi was clever, Wolfswinkel had to give him that. He stalked his enemy with the greatest care, using his familiarity with the lay of the land to aid his strategy. There wasn’t a gully or a boulder or a shrub on the hillside that Jimothi and the cats didn’t know. They shadowed the bone beasts with utmost caution, the mingling of firelight and grass stalks concealing their striped fur.

  But finally they had to attack; and for all their courage and their skills as warriors, they couldn’t oppose the terrible efficiency of the bone beasts. One by one, the tarrie-cats fell. And those that rose to spend another life and another and another finally ran out of resurrections, and did not rise again.

  Finally Jimothi conceded the inevitable. The tarries had lost the battle. The bone beasts, whatever they were, had gained the hill. To fight on would only cause further purposeless slaughter. Reluctantly he sounded the retreat; and reluctantly the surviving tarrie-cats, no more than a handful, left the field, carrying their wounded away with them.

  “The beasts have Wolfswinkel all to themselves,” Jimothi said. “For what he’s worth. And damn them all to hell for this hour’s bloodletting.”

  As soon as Wolfswinkel realized that the tarries were retreating, and that it would only be a matter of time before his liberators came to his threshold, he went to get ready. He had let his appearance deteriorate of late; or so the mirror told him. His beard had grown long, and his hair was a rat’s nest. His yellow suit was dirty (luckily he had nineteen, all of identical color and cut) and the front of his vest was caked with pieces of poppy pie and leech ice cream, along with the inevitable rum stains.

  He had no time to bathe, so he splashed on pungent cologne he’d bought in an emporium in Commexo City just before his arrest for murder. Then he put on a clean suit, did his best to hurriedly trim his beard, and—placing all six of his hats on his head (thus increasing his power tenfold)—he headed to the front door to await his visitors.

  Before he could reach it, however, something slammed so hard on the door that the hinges gave way and it flew off, spinning across the tiles and missing Wolfswinkel by inches. As the cloud of dust cleared from the air, a creature stepped over the threshold and into the house. It was one of the bone-helmeted beasts that had shed so much blood among the soldiers and the tarrie-cats. Wolfswinkel retreated a few steps, afraid of what the thing might do to him. Where was its master? And why were threads of darkness spilling from its fingertips, weaving themselves into elaborate configurations around the beast?

  This wasn’t the only mystery. Two more creatures now came into view, to the left and right of the first. Each had a hand that bled darkness into the air, knotting itself with the configurations from the beast in the center. They were subtly connecting themselves.

  Wolfswinkel was intimidated. But he knew better than to show it. He stood his ground.

  “What do you want from me?” he said.

  The trio responded by throwing back their bony heads in perfect unison
and expelling long, eerie sighs. Their skulls seemed to lose rigidity and they too issued filaments of shadow-stuff, which knitted themselves together. The three were becoming one, their bony heads congealing into a single being, its identity unmistakably human.

  So this is their master, Wolfswinkel realized. There was one mind; one will divided among the three of them, which was now making itself apparent. Its humanity was no great comfort to Wolfswinkel: it still exuded an air of threat, and he was a coward to his marrow. But he had nowhere to run. He could only stand and watch as the process continued and the face of the three beasts folded into a single entity. The eyes, when they became clear, were gray and unforgiving, the mouth a tight, thin line. Smoky folds of fabric enveloped its body from head to foot, and there seemed to be small, smeared faces in the weave.

  Finally, a voice emerged from the still-transforming shape: a woman’s voice.

  “My, my, little wizard,” she said, the words making everything shake a little. “You live in chaos!”

  Wolfswinkel looked around. The woman was right.

  “It’s not my fault,” he said. “I had a slave once. A geshrat. But he was taken from me. . . .”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  The three forms had been entirely subsumed into a single body now. The bone beasts had disappeared completely and had been replaced by an old woman dressed in what looked like a garment made of antiquated dolls.

  “Do you know who I am?” she said.

  “You’re the woman with the needle and thread,” the wizard replied. “You’re Mater Motley.”

  The old lady smiled. “And you are Kaspar Wolfswinkel, the murderer of the five members of the Noncian Magic Circle.” Kaspar opened his mouth to protest his innocence, but Mater Motley waved his protests away. “Frankly I could not care less whether you killed ten magicians or a thousand. I haven’t come here to hire an assassin.”

  “Oh? What then?”

  “I don’t know how much you know about my plans,” she said. “I keep most of my business hidden from sight. I find it’s safer that way. Otherwise people start to interfere. Even so, perhaps you’ve heard a little?”

  “More than a little,” Wolfswinkel said. “I can’t do much locked away up here, but I can certainly listen.”

  “To what, exactly?”

  “Oh . . . you of all people know how many scraps and fragments are out there. On the wind. In the way the stars fall. In the shapes of the clouds. I study these things very carefully. I haven’t got much else to do.”

  Mater Motley was surprised. She had expected to find more of a bumbler in Kaspar Wolfswinkel. But behind that ugly, embittered face, with its raw stare and downturned mouth, was somebody she might well make more use of than she’d first supposed.

  “You’d be surprised what I hear,” he continued. “But I have ways of doing what you do.” He smiled. “Threading things together.”

  “Oh, so that’s what I do, is it?”

  “It’s what I hear,” he said. “I hear that you live in the Thirteenth Tower of the fortress of Iniquisit; you and your seamstresses sew all the time. Night on Night on Night. Never sleeping.”

  “I sleep occasionally,” Mater Motley said. “But I sew even then.”

  “You’re making stitchlings.”

  “Yes.”

  “An army.”

  “Yes.”

  “So that one of these Nights—”

  “Enough, wizard. You’ve proved your point.”

  “But just so I understand, it is your intention to conquer the islands?” Mater Motley didn’t reply. “You can trust me. I swear,” Wolfswinkel said.

  “I trust only my seamstresses.”

  “Not your grandson?”

  “I can’t quite. Not at the moment. He has some problems of his own, you see. Which is the matter that brings me here.”

  “Of course I’d be only too happy to be of assistance, but I’m locked up here.”

  “You’ve just been liberated, wizard.”

  “The tarrie-cats?”

  “Forget about them. You and I will walk away from this prison of yours without being challenged.”

  “But they’ll send more troops to recapture me.” He proffered a smug little smile. “I’ve murdered five people.”

  “Let them send troops. I don’t care. I’m in the mood to spill more blood.” She stared at the portrait paintings on the wall. “Are these your victims?”

  “Yes. They were magicians. All their power was in their hats—”

  “So you murdered your friends for their hats?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cold, wizard, cold. Frankly I’d heard you were an hysteric and a drunkard, but this episode with the Quackenbush girl seems to have toughened you up a bit.”

  “I’m ready for anything.”

  “Are you ready to swear allegiance to me?”

  “Of course. Of course.”

  Wolfswinkel dropped to his knees in front of Mater Motley and snatched up the heavy hem of her dress, pressing his face into its folds.

  “I’m yours!” he said. “You have only to command me.”

  “I need you to watch over my grandson. Keep a casual eye on him for me. I don’t trust his instinct where this girl from the Hereafter is concerned. I swear she has some kind of hold over him that I don’t understand.”

  Wolfswinkel’s expression grew sly. “Well . . . I’ve heard things . . .”

  “About the girl?”

  “Scraps and fragments.”

  “Well, I’ve no interest in rumor,” Mater Motley said. “When you can come to me with hard evidence, then I’ll listen. Just don’t go back to your old ways, wizard. No drink. No murder, unless I sanction it. I’m hiring you to watch. Not gossip. Watch. If I sense for a moment that you are pushing beyond the limits of your usefulness, then I will dispose of you. I won’t give you back to the tarries. I’ll have you skinned and stuffed with Todo mud. Do we understand each other?”

  Again Wolfswinkel kissed the hem of Mater Motley’s dress. “I understand. Absolutely. Just instruct me.”

  “Well, you can start by letting go of my garment.”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “Now get up.”

  Wolfswinkel scrambled to his feet. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Here’s a letter. Take it to a man called Julix Mirethak. He lives in Churngold, on Soma Plume.”

  “How will I get there?”

  “Take the smaller of the two boats you’ll find down at the little harbor on the early side of this Hour. The letter instructs both you and Mirethak how to proceed. We will meet in a day’s time, at a place I’ve named. Move quickly and without undue show, Wolfswinkel. If I hear you’ve broken the bond of silence between us—and I will hear if you do so—it’s a skinning for you. Now take the letter and get out of my sight.”

  Kaspar claimed the letter from Mater Motley’s hand, stepped back and made an extravagant bow. Then he opened his mouth to make one last profession of his undying devotion, thought better of it and instead departed the house in haste, lingering on the lower slope of the hill just long enough to see where the blood of the tarrie-cats, his sometime captors, glittered in the grass. Then, whistling tunelessly to himself, he went to find a boat, a free man.

  Chapter 27

  Abduction

  WHEN CANDY OPENED HER eyes, all she could think was how much she wanted to put her arms around her mother; to hold her tight and to be hugged in return. It was such a simple thing, but at that moment there was nothing she wanted more.

  She sat up on the cook’s bed where she’d been napping and looked around. The kitchen was very still. The wind had died away while she was slumbering, so the leaf- and blossom-laden branches no longer churned overhead. There were no birds chattering or singing up there: they’d either fled or were keeping their tunes to themselves. And strangest of all, perhaps, was the absence of any sound or opinion of the newly resurrected tribe of Totemix. They had been making a happy din when she’d gone to
sleep, as if to announce: we’re alive and free! Candy couldn’t imagine a happier sound. But now their noise had been silenced.

  “Filth?” she said. “Where are you?”

  Again, silence. Something had happened here while she slept: but what?

  “Filth?” she said, raising her voice. “Are you there?”

  There was no response, so she headed off in search of him. The same eerie stillness she’d woken to in the kitchen had taken grip of the whole of the Twilight Palace. Passageways and chambers alike were silent. It wasn’t that the birds weren’t up in the branches; they were, she could see them. They’d just decided to stop singing for some reason.

  “Filth?” she called again. “Where are you? Filth!”

  At last she heard the sound of a muted cry, and following it from chamber to chamber, she discovered the munkee lying on the ground with his mouth gagged, his arms tied tight behind him and his legs bound at the ankles. She unknotted the gag.

  “Lordy Lou!” he said, spitting out the taste of the gag. “I thought that was the end of me, I really did.”

  “Who did this to you?”

  “Never mind about me. It isn’t me he’s come for, it’s you!”

  “Again: who?”

  “I don’t know his name. Some young man with a nasty look in his eyes. You have to get out of here!”

  She untied his hands, and the first thing he did was push her away from him.

  “Go!” he said.

  “Not without you.”

  “That’s very noble of you,” Filth said. “Really it is. But . . . to be perfectly honest, I don’t think you’re the safest of people to be hanging around with right now. Not with that beast-boy after you. He’s lethal, that one.”

  “You do know who he is,” Candy said.

  “I have my suspicions,” Filth admitted. “But this isn’t the time or the place to discuss them. You have to go before—” He stopped in midsentence. Then he said: “Oh, dear.”

  “What?”

  “We’re too late. He’s here.”

  Candy looked all around. “I don’t see anybody.”