The Dire King Read online

  “He’s already dead,” said Jackaby heavily.

  Mona ignored him. She was at the policeman’s head. She pressed his arms together into his chest and then raised them both up over his head, then repeated the motion.

  “What are you doing?” Jenny asked.

  “Silvester method. Artificial respiration.”

  “He’s gone,” said Jackaby.

  “Do I tell you how to hunt fairy tales, or whatever it is you do?” Mona barked. “I’ve seen breath come back to those longer gone than him.”

  A series of shouts erupted from the battlefield, and the earth shook. The colossal Mr. Dawl had fallen. Over the heads of our allies I could see the Unseelie army’s frost giant, the jötun, stomping into the fray. An orange blur darted across the plain just ahead of me. I glanced up. Bounding toward me was what appeared to be a miniature troll riding an orange tabby cat like a warhorse. I raised my blade as it raced toward us, but Jackaby caught me before I could swing.

  “Not that one!”

  I paused.

  “Hammett.” Jackaby addressed the diminutive figure. “Hatun would be proud of you.”

  The little troll barked something in a language I could not fathom.

  “Not yet,” answered Jackaby. “We still don’t know where they’ve taken her.”

  The troll snarled and pulled at the reins, and the cat bounded away. Hammett sliced at the heels of his enemies as they disappeared into the mess.

  Loup, his jaws red with blood, leapt across the clearing, snapping and snarling as frightened soldiers scattered. Lydia Lee was trying frantically to maneuver a bleeding gnome onto her litter. Her head shot up and she froze. She was directly in the wolf’s path. Loup stalked forward, eyes bloodshot, growling. And then, very suddenly, a chocolate brown hound stood between her and the wolf.

  Charlie had always seemed so large in his canine form. He did not seem large now. The wolf loomed over them, big and black and built of raw muscle and razor-sharp teeth. Charlie was half his size. The wolf did not slow as he neared them.

  Marlowe yelled a command, and a cadre of policemen opened fire. Loup roared as the bullets ripped into him. When the volley paused, Charlie bounded forward and lunged for the wolf’s neck, but Loup was too fast for him. He caught Charlie with a nasty bite that nearly tore his ear clean off. Charlie yelped and stumbled into the dirt.

  Jackaby was holding me back before I realized I was lunging forward.

  “Let go of me! He’ll kill him!” I said.

  “No, stop! Look!” Jackaby pointed.

  Movement erupted at the tree line. A pack of great burly hounds burst onto the field. The lead hound was larger than Charlie, his fur patterned in rich browns and jet blacks with flecks of white about his muzzle. A dozen more raced behind them.

  “Is that—?”

  “The Om Caini,” said Jackaby. “That’s Charlie’s uncle in the lead, if I’m not mistaken.”

  The Om Caini struck like lightning. Loup caught sight of a tawny hound closing in on his left and snapped at it, only to have Dragomir make the first attack from his right. Loup howled in pain and anger as another hound locked its jaws on his flank, and then a third at his throat. The dogs were merciless.

  Lydia dragged the gnome away from the fight, panting. Mona O’Connor continued lifting and lowering the policeman’s arms. He did not appear to be coming back.

  As if reacting to my thought, the policeman took a sudden wheezing breath.

  Mona fell over backward. “Ha!” she declared triumphantly.

  The policeman sat up.

  “Take it easy,” Mona told him. “Stay down. You’ve got half a dozen broken ribs at least, you need rest.”

  “Get away!” Jackaby yelled.

  “What are you talking about?” Mona began.

  That’s when I noticed the policeman’s glassy eyes.

  “Get back!” I cried, but the undead officer turned on Miss O’Connor. His pale hands shot out and he had her by the neck of her shirtwaist. Jackaby and I leapt forward as one, but Jenny shot past us both.

  She threw herself at the reanimated corpse as if diving to tackle him, but instead Jenny’s features sank into his, a swirl of silver mist fading away behind her as she vanished. The policeman froze.

  Mona pulled away from him slowly, her eyes enormous, and the officer released his grip. He stood, moving clumsily, looking down at his own limbs.

  “I—I have him,” the man said hoarsely. It was hard to hear the voice as Jenny’s through the deep vocal cords, but something in the man’s eyes told me she was in there. “It’s not like a living body,” she said. “It’s just a shell. There’s a voice in here with me. I don’t think it’s his. I can hear it whispering in the back of his skull.”

  “Look out!” Lydia cried. A spear came flying through the air, and Jenny slid out of the body half a second before the tip buried itself in the dead man’s head.

  The policeman toppled into the grass next to the injured gnome. Jenny hovered in the air. Lydia Lee was quietly sick in the bush behind her. She spat and wiped her mouth. “Enough gawking,” she said. “Back to work, everyone.”

  And so the war raged on. The dead of both sides lay strewn across the battlefield. In the dust and smoke and stench, a man was emerging from the church. It was the thin man with white-blond hair whom Virgule had called Mr. Tilde. The battle seemed to bend around him, affording him a cushion of eerie calm. He held a small stone to his lips, and when he spoke, his voice carried over the din of the battle.

  “Warriors. The Dire King has a message for you all.”

  The clamor of fighting ebbed and a tense hush settled over the battleground.

  Tilde continued. “All of the otherworldly creatures currently taking up arms alongside these humans. You are free to go. Leave. Your new king has no need of your blood this day. Assist me in returning to him the human called the Seer, and you can even earn yourself a place in his coming kingdom.”

  “Oi! Ye’re supposed ta be one o’ the good un’s!” cried a disgusted voice. It sounded like Nudd’s, but I could not see the goblin chief from where we stood. “Ye’re nae one o’ these Unseelie munters!”

  “I am Seelie,” the Tilde confirmed, smiling. There was a rumbling, like a roll of distant thunder, and the ground shivered. “Do you know,” he said, ignoring the seismic interruptions, “that many Seelie fae are born with innate talents? Some control light and shadow. Some can make the plants grow. Some can even change the weather.” The ground shook again, and this time one of the gravestones in the field behind us cracked in two. “We cannot control what gifts we are born with. They are a part of us. It seems wrong, then, to label some of these gifts good and others evil, doesn’t it? Wrong to tell a child that he can never rise to his true potential, that he can never use his gifts.” The soil within the graveyard began to churn. “The Dire King understands that we all just want our chance to bring something . . . beautiful into the world.”

  The first decrepit hand to burst free of its grave site was blue-gray, its flesh rotted and sloughing off its bones. It was pitted with stones and dark with wet earth from its journey up from the coffin. As the corpse clawed its way free of the topsoil, a second hand burst up behind it. And another. And another. The entire churchyard was rising.

  “They are beautiful, aren’t they?” said Tilde.

  “You’re not special,” spat Lydia Lee. She stood with her shoulders squared as she faced Tilde. “You’re a bully. I’ve met a hundred bullies just like you. You’re afraid, so you poison the world into being afraid, too. There’s nothing beautiful about that.”

  “You think I am afraid?” Tilde said.

  “I know it. I know fear. And I know strength. Real strength comes from courage and compassion and hope. Never fear.”

  “You think you still have hope?” Tilde cocked his head at Miss Lee. “Wel
l, I’ll just have to see to that.” He took a measured breath, and then closed his eyes in concentration. All across the battlefield, butchered bodies sat up, their eyes glassy. Imps, goblins, centaurs, even the towering figure of our once-loyal Mr. Dawl rose alongside the human dead.

  Any illusion I had harbored that our motley volunteer army might have been a match for the Dire King’s forces vanished. Hundreds of savage corpses had joined the fight, every soldier that had fallen plus a whole field of the properly buried—and with every new body that fell from here on in, their ranks would only grow.

  We had lost. All that was left now was the dying.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The noise of battle renewed itself with deafening intensity. The dead dragged the living to the ground. Screams of fear and bellows of anger and pain echoed across the parish. The air over the battlefield smelled rotten—worse, it tasted rotten, and I couldn’t seem to draw a clear breath. The sound of gunfire pierced the air less and less often as the last futile rounds left the barrels of their guns.

  I swung the black blade for all I was worth. The recently unburied dead, at least, were brittle and far more easily decapitated than the freshly slain, but for every one of their ranks that I felled, I could see two more of our own being overtaken.

  “We can’t keep this up,” Jackaby grunted as he felled another shambling corpse.

  “I know a way,” came a woman’s voice behind us. We both turned.

  Alina stood there, flinching at the sounds of the battle all around her. “I found it,” she said. “You can’t stop this fight from here, Detective. You need to do what you came here to do in the first place. We need to get you back to that machine. I—I can take you there.”

  Jackaby eyed her curiously. “Lead the way.”

  Returning to the Annwyn through the church would have been unthinkable. Within the ruins, the dead had fallen and risen again angry—but Alina had found a smaller rend around the back of the church, near the tree line. Jackaby went first. The sounds of the battle faded as we crossed into the Annwyn. We emerged to face a familiar landscape. After the deafening clamor, Hafgan’s Hold was unsettlingly silent.

  Alina’s path had led us almost directly behind the tower. Stones littered the ground all around the keep, but just as many remained suspended in midair by the power of the cohesion charm. As silently as possible, we climbed through the spiraling, weightless debris into the ruined keep. The generators hummed loudly. An Unseelie soldier, a troll, had climbed into one of the metal frames at the base of the tower for his chance to become a great and powerful Dire Warrior, but something had gone horribly wrong. The wretch’s arm had become stuck in the metalwork. The process had made him larger still, and thus more inexorably stuck. Unable to pull free, the troll had warped to a grotesque parody of his original shape.

  “It is a power that burns,” Jackaby recalled.

  The Dire King was up there, I mouthed. Alina bit her lip and looked as though she wanted to run. She took a deep breath and kept with us. The stairway, although supported by nothing but empty air, held our weight without crumbling. Several of the stairs were badly cracked or missing entirely, but we were able to negotiate them without incident. None of us said a word in the foreboding silence as we ascended. When we reached the third floor, Jackaby again took the lead. He crested the landing gingerly, and then rose to his full height, peering around. The machinery hummed loudly, a thrumming, rhythmic buzz.

  “Where is the Dire King?” Alina whispered, her eyes darting back and forth.

  “Mysteriously absent,” answered Jackaby. His brow was furrowed as he peered around the landing.

  “He could be back any moment.” I swallowed. “We need to be quick. This is where he controls it all. Can you see how it works?”

  Jackaby climbed up onto the raised control stage. “I can see—hold on. I can see an aura, over there. Human.” Jackaby stepped to the edge to peer down. An inclined platform was set at an angle just below the control panel. A smile broke Jackaby’s brooding face.

  “Hatun!” he yelled over the thrum of the machine. “You’re alive! And we’ve come to rescue you!”

  “About time!” Hatun called back. She was strapped to the platform by her wrists and ankles. A series of tinted glass discs like giant magnifying glasses hung over her head. “Hey,” she said as Jackaby leaned his head around the lenses to see her clearly. “Is that my knitting?”

  “It is!” Jackaby beamed.

  “Why are you wearing my new sundries bag on your big head?”

  “It is a hat!” Jackaby hollered back, proud and defiant. “And I love it!”

  Hatun shook her head. “Are you going to get me out of this thing or not?”

  We climbed out onto the ledge. The platform on which Hatun was strapped hung over the demolished edge of the landing. Below us I could see the wretched, deformed troll. Its head twitched. Jackaby undid the straps on the far side, while I got those on the near. Her arm bore a long, deep cut, although the blood was already mostly dry. Very carefully, we helped her off the device. Her steps were shaky.

  “This place doesn’t have its walls attached,” she said. “Just a bunch of floating bricks.”

  “That’s true,” I told her.

  “Hm—you see it, too?” Hatun said. “That’s probably bad. I was hoping that it was just me. Did you see the man with red eyes and the big black hat?”

  “The Dire King,” I said. “Do you know where he went?”

  Hatun shook her head. “I’m sorry. I feel like a damn fool,” she said. “I came to help, not to be bait locked away in a tower.”

  “You’re not a fool. We were all just worried about you,” I said. “Even Hammett came looking for you.”

  “You should take Hatun back through the barrier,” said Jackaby. “I’m going to try to see what I can do with this.”

  “Can’t we just tear it apart?” I said. I raised the black blade.

  “No! No, no, no. Definitely no. That would be exceedingly bad right now. Do you see that metal tank down there? That is a containment reserve. The vital energy of an entire army of highly magical creatures is collected in there. Some of it got pumped into the Unseelie soldiers, but it still contains a massive reserve of power. Releasing that energy now could set off a dangerous blast of untempered magic.”

  “Enough to turn someone into a duck?”

  “Enough to turn New Fiddleham into a duck,” Jackaby said. “It’s a magic bomb, and it needs to be defused and dismantled.”

  “I’ll leave the supernatural science to you, sir. Do be careful.”

  I helped Hatun down the floating steps. Her legs were shaking terribly all the way.

  “Hammett will be happy to see you alive and well,” I said. “I met him face-to-face for the first time today. He’s actually a little bit cute.”

  Hatun smiled. “Don’t go calling him cute to his face, though. He will eat your toes.”

  We reached the rift behind the tower and slid through. “The road is just along there,” I said.

  “You go,” Hatun said. “I can find my way well enough.”

  I nodded and climbed back through the rend. Just as I slid back in the Annwyn, a flash of something pale flicked in the corner of my eye. I whipped my head to see it disappear behind the ruined tower. I blinked, unsure if I had really seen anything at all. There was another flutter of movement and I definitely caught sight of something white disappearing around the corner of a squat stone building next to the keep. Cautiously I walked around the side of the structure, the black blade drawn, but when I came around the corner there was nothing to see. The hair on the back of my neck prickled. I was not alone in the courtyard.

  I looked up at the third-story landing. Alina was pacing the floor, her dark hair bobbing in and out of view. I had a good view of the control stage from where I stood. Jackaby was tracing a wire to its sou
rce through a handful of cables. All manner of switches and toggles and little red lights appeared behind him. My blood froze. Two red eyes moved forward out of the darkness. The shadows took shape. A dark cloak. A black crown.

  Jackaby’s back was to the figure. I screamed, but the buzz of the machinery and the droning of the generators drowned me out. I felt like I was in a nightmare.

  Alina saw him. She grabbed Jackaby by his coat, but he pulled away from her. Alina stumbled backward. There was a flurry of movement and the shadowy figure struck Jackaby at the base of the skull.

  For just a moment, a glimmer of hope hung in my mind; Jackaby still could not be harmed. Perhaps the Dire King did not realize the power of the gem? Perhaps this would be Jackaby’s chance to snatch the upper hand!

  My hopes crumpled with Jackaby’s body. He collapsed to the floor of the control stage at the feet of the dark king. My head reeled. It wasn’t possible! How?

  And then Alina stepped forward. Her shivering, frightened affectations had ceased. She sank down on one knee in front of the Dire King and held up her hand. In it was clutched the gleaming red gem.

  I felt sick as realization struck, and the world spun. Alina had betrayed us.

  Alina hadn’t been trying to pull Jackaby out of harm’s way. She had been stealing Hafgan’s shield from his pocket. The gem glinted as the Dire King accepted her offering. He put a pale hand on her shoulder as he held the stone up in the light. It was a perfect match for his ruby red eyes.

  Chapter Thirty

  I ran numbly to the edge of the tower, where I would be out of the Dire King’s line of sight.

  I closed my eyes and tried to slow my heartbeat. Jackaby was down. Our army was losing. Alina had betrayed us. And I was alone. I could believe in multiple worlds, but perhaps not in a world in which I could take on an invulnerable evil king and his minions all by myself.

  I opened my eyes slowly. I was going to be as good as I could be, even if I was not good enough. I gripped the black blade in my shaking fist.