Queen's Gambit

by Karen Chance

  Too many.

  But I’d make them rue the day anyway.

  I drew a gun and tried to remember how my feet worked, getting ready for the moment when my shield failed. I vaguely wondered why I hadn’t been attacked already, while I was off-balance and vulnerable. But I hadn’t, probably because they didn’t view me as much of a threat.

  Yeah, we’d see how much threat I was, I thought, surging to my feet.

  And then abruptly plopping back down on my butt, when I almost blacked out.

  I snarled at them like a wounded animal. Nobody snarled back. And they seemed to be taking an awfully long time to get to me, or was my brain playing tricks?

  I blinked at them, trying to bring my fuzzy vision into better focus. And belatedly noticed something I’d missed. Because these . . . were not normal looking fey.

  They kind of looked like they’d been hanging out in the dead zones a little too long. The bodies were mostly all right, except for one with a huge hunchback and what looked like some spines growing out of it. But everything else . . .

  I scuttled out of the way of one with long, greasy white locks that weren’t the usual silver bright color I was used to, like moonlight distilled. Instead, these were flat and dead, like his face, which appeared to be sliding off the bones, with huge, red, gaping holes under the eyes. They weren’t wounds, but rather the sockets, which had sagged an inch or more into his cheeks, leaving bloody half-moons under yellowed, bloodshot eyes. The irises were milky as if in death, but apparently still able to see. Because he followed me as I crab walked backwards, so freaked out that I couldn’t get back to my feet.

  He bent down, that horrible, dead face in mine. And, of course, just about that time, my shield gave out. I felt like screaming, but I didn’t have the breath. And before I could get it, he spoke, in a horrible, dry rattle, completely unlike any voice I’d ever heard, human or fey.

  Although it didn’t matter, as I couldn’t focus on the words anyway, since the stench of his breath almost had me passing out again.

  It smelled like death. It smelled like old death, weeks past its prime, full of rot and decay. It smelled—

  I couldn’t describe how it smelled.

  I rolled away, desperate to get out of range of that stench, but now they were all coming at me. Not quickly, not with weapons, and not in any other way threatening. Just coming.

  And it was worse than any attack I’d ever suffered.

  “What the fuck?” That was Tomas’s voice, and then Louis-Cesare’s arms were around me, pulling me up.

  I knew him instinctively, and assumed that the rest of the team was here, too, but I didn’t turn to see. I couldn’t seem to move. Because the fey were still coming, only not with the springy grace they usually had, but with a shuffling, halting sort of walk. Even worse, they were speaking.

  I didn’t know the language; didn’t know what they said.

  But Tomas seemed to.

  “What do they want?” Louis-Cesare rasped. And, for once, the two weren’t arguing. Petty, or even not so petty, emotions just didn’t hold up in here.

  “They want us to kill them,” Tomas said blankly, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, either.

  “Not a problem,” Jason said harshly, and raised his gun.

  Tomas shoved it down. “They want to die in Faerie! That’s the only way their souls can be reborn. It’s their religion.”

  “Fuck their religion.”

  But Sarah was a little more generous of heart. She didn’t say anything, but she came forward and put a hand on her brother’s shoulder. And, without a word being spoken, Jason holstered the gun.

  “You’re the expert,” he said to Tomas. But he was still fingering his weapon, as if he’d enjoy granting their request.

  Only, it looked to me like somebody already had.

  “Jonathan,” Louis-Cesare said.

  And, yeah, obviously.

  But Tomas didn’t seem to agree. “No,” he said, because of course, he’d know the story. They had been master and servant for something like a century, whether Tomas had liked it or not. And he seemed generous enough not to make fun of that, at least. “But he isn’t behind this.”

  “He is. He’s here.”

  And something about the way Louis-Cesare said it, made shivers go down my spine.

  “You can’t make zombies out of fey,” Tomas insisted. “They’re not like us. Their bodies and souls . . . they are linked in a way that ours just aren’t. Necromancers don’t want a soul in house. They want to put a bit of their soul in an empty vessel, to control the creature they’ve created.”

  “And . . . what would happen . . . if there was already a soul in place?” Sarah asked.

  We looked at the horrible creatures in front of us.

  I thought we had our answer.

  Someone suddenly screamed. It was a high-pitched sound that could have come from either a man or a woman, and it was loud enough that everybody jumped. Even the vamps.

  “Shit!” Sarah said. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  I’d never agreed with anything more.

  We moved back to the area around the burning truck and mostly destroyed entryway of the warehouse. There were a lot more bodies there, but they weren’t fey and they weren’t moving. Zheng turned one over. A little gold charm was on the ground under the corpse. I guessed it was one of the kinds that came off after death.

  He picked it up.

  “Eternity,” he said, turning it over in his fingers.

  “So . . . the fey killed the triad?” Jason asked, sounding dubious. Maybe because those fey didn’t look capable of killing anyone.

  “They’re supposed to be working together,” Louis-Cesare said. “They hit Hassani’s court together.”

  “Seems like they’ve had a bit of a falling out,” Zheng said dryly.

  And then the scream came again, and this time, it was possible to tell the direction. We looked at each other, but we’d come this far. We cautiously followed some stairs down to a basement.

  It seemed intact, if dank, with water spots on the walls and suspicious scurrying in the corners. It would have been perfect as an old, horror movie set. All it needed was a monster.

  Only, it had one of those, too.

  “See? See?” There was a creature on the floor, at the far end of the large space, but the acoustics were good enough for the voice to carry. “There they are! Just as I promised. My creatures didn’t manage to find it at Hassani’s court, but they have it. They have it! They think the girl is here, so they must have brought—”

  “I don’t care about the device!” a woman hissed.

  “But—but you must. Isn’t that what all this has been about?” The voice turned angry. “You’ve been beating me up for half an hour because I lost the damned thing and now you tell me—”

  A large fey stepped forward, and the creature put its hands over its head, cowering.

  The woman who had been standing over it turned, and I froze. Long, floor-length blonde hair, beautiful, sweet face, faint silver light spilling everywhere. I knew her.

  But . . . that was impossible.

  “Efridis,” I whispered, and felt Louis-Cesare stiffen beside me.

  She looked at me blankly for a moment, then turned back to what she was doing. Which appeared to be torturing who or whatever was on the floor. There were some fey around her, healthy, normal looking ones, maybe a dozen.

  They didn’t react to our presence, either.

  I looked at Louis-Cesare; he looked at me. “Stay here,” he told the others.

  “Gladly,” Zheng said.

  We walked forward.

  Efridis was looking a little worse for the wear herself. Her usually perfect hair was tangled and wild, and her normally silk clad body was dressed in a woolen tunic and leggings, much like those that the male fey wore. But there was something else, something . . . almost raw on her face. I couldn’t describe it; didn’t understand it.

  But it was not the look o
f a well woman.

  Which was fair, as she was supposed to be dead.

  “Please,” the creature on the floor said plaintively. “Please, I don’t understand. I did all that you asked—”

  “And more.” Her voice, too, was a rasp, so different from her usual, melodic tones. She knelt down, and turned his face up to the light. “I saw your creatures,” she whispered.

  I gasped; I admit it. Because that was also someone I knew. And someone else who was supposed to be dead.

  Jonathan.

  I glanced at Louis-Cesare. I didn’t know what expression I’d expected, when he came face to face with his old nemesis again, but it wasn’t that one. He’d looked blank for a moment, and then a succession of emotions had flashed across his face, too fast to read. But in the end, he settled on . . . puzzled.

  Okay, I guessed that . . . was an emotion. It wasn’t the one that I was experiencing, though. Not even close.

  My hand went to my knife, because I wanted to feel this kill. No easy gunshot, simple and bloodless, at least if you managed to stay out of the splatter zone. No, I wanted—

  And then I stopped, my hand still on the hilt of my weapon, because I’d begun to understand my husband’s expression. This wasn’t the man I remembered. That man had been frighteningly talented, brash, more than a little crazy, and above all, scary. This . . .

  What the hell was this?

  He looked more like the shambling, possibly-zombies outside than anything I remembered. His face was sallow and heavily creased; his eyes sunken and dull; his hair thin and gray, as if he’d aged decades since we saw his body in the Circle’s dank holding cell. That had been the man I remembered; this—

  “No,” I said, the word bursting out of me on a puff of air, a single, visceral reaction.

  Efridis glanced at me. “Yes, he hurt you, too, did he not? You may have him when I am done, if there is anything left.”

  I looked at Louis-Cesare. I understood exactly nothing, but I knew he would have at least one answer for me. “Is it . . .?”

  He didn’t immediately reply. He knelt down, putting him and maybe-Jonathan’s head on a level, and searched those too-dull eyes. Then he did what I couldn’t have, and leaned in. And sniffed him.

  I doubted that it was a pleasant experience, although the man appeared relatively clean, except for spots where it looked like the fey had been throwing him around the basement floor. But there was something unsavory about him. The stench of dark magic, Louis-Cesare had always said, but Ranbir was supposedly a dark mage, and he’d smelled like sweat and fried chicken. Not like . . .

  “He’s dead,” I said, finally placing that smell. It was the same one that the fey had been giving off upstairs, only fainter. And underneath a boatload of cologne that only made it worse by contrast.

  “Yes, I’m dead!” Jonathan snarled, some of the old fire coming back into his eyes. “That damned Pythia—she killed me! She killed me twice!”

  “Apparently she needed to do it a third time,” I said, feeling dizzy. I looked at Louis-Cesare. “Is it him?”

  He nodded.

  “Tell them,” Efridis said, looking at Jonathan. “Tell them what you have done.”

  And, immediately, there was a change of demeanor. From outraged pride to groveling pathos. “Please, Lady, we can make some kind of accommodation between us. I can help you—”

  “You’ve ‘helped me’ enough. Tell them!”

  It was not a request.

  But Jonathan seemed confused and vaguely petulant. “I can’t confess if I don’t know what I did!”

  “Don’t know?” It was almost a yell. And it was accompanied by a lovely, manicured hand reaching down, grabbing the huddled figure by the hair, and jerking him upward. “What you did, was to butcher our people. What you did, was to make monsters out of our dead! Desecrating their bodies and endangering their very souls!”

  “Oh.” Jonathan swallowed. “I’m . . . sorry?”

  She just stared at him, her face a mix of shock, disbelief and revulsion. I took my chance. “How are you still walking around?”

  He scowled at me. “I could ask you the same thing. Louis-Cesare should have been able to battle his way through that, but not you. I sent repeated burst of magic at you; those things should have eaten you alive.”

  So that was why we’d suddenly been so popular, I thought, and barely refrained from kicking him.

  But he noticed, and his expression sharpened. “I bet your bitch sister is having fun in Faerie, if she’s still alive. I bet—”

  He broke off with a scream, probably because Efridis had just torn out most of his hair. She did not seem to be in a good mood. And Jonathan, however much pain he was in, knew it.

  “Tell us what you did!”

  “All right, all right!” he glared up at her. “I was doing an experiment—with permission, of course. King Aeslinn lost a lot of fey at the recent battle over his capitol. I asked if I could have some, for an experiment I wanted to run—”

  “Some . . . what?” I asked.

  Those creepy, colorless eyes turned to me. “Bodies. What else? He said yes.”

  There was a change in the air of the room suddenly. I couldn’t have said exactly what it was, as no sounds were uttered that were audible to me, and nobody appeared to have moved. But there was an element of menace that hadn’t been there before.

  Jonathan felt it, too.

  “I’m not lying!” he said, sending his eyes around. “He said it. He said he didn’t care. And how was I supposed to know about your religion?”

  “You’ve lived in Faerie long enough,” Efridis hissed.

  “But I don’t pay attention to those sorts of things! I was there to get godly tech, to help with my experiments. As far as I knew, they were just dead bodies. Stronger, more resilient, but dead, all right? I wasn’t—I didn’t mean—”

  “What in the hell were you doing with them?” I asked.

  Jonathan looked annoyed. “The obvious, I should think. I am, as you can see, very dead. That puts me in a bit of a bind. Luckily, I had already started the aforementioned experiments, to see whether fey could make decent zombies. The answer is no, by the way—”

  “That isn’t all you were doing,” Efridis said. “You changed them.”

  “Yes, well, that’s what experimentation is. I was trying out different possibilities. Fortunately, I had put a bit of my soul into several, to see if I could control them. It didn’t work very well, but it meant that, once I died, there was a tiny bit of me still around. But it’s very little. I basically had to make a zombie out of myself in order to—”

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait.”

  Jonathan waited.

  “You put the bits of soul . . . from the fey experiments . . . into your dead body and . . . reanimated it?”

  Jonathan blinked at me. “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  “I think I need to sit down.”

  To my surprise, one of the fey brought me over a chair.

  I took it, because this was so surreal, nothing surprised me anymore.

  “So, I’m dead,” Jonathan continued, like this was a perfectly normal conversation to be having. “But I’m still useful. I did a great deal for the Svarestri royal house, and I can do much more. These idiots have the device, so I can do the operation as soon as you find the girl. Plus, you know what I’ve made here.” And no, we didn’t, but then, he wasn’t talking to us anymore. His eyes had slid over to Efridis, who was standing there, as still as a statue. “I can give it to you instead of him. I can hand you your husband’s throne; the thrones of all the great houses of Faerie. I can give you honor, fame, renown for the ages—anything you want.

  “And all I want in return,” he said, looking at Louis-Cesare. “Is him.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Dory, Hong Kong

  “Why?” I said, getting in Jonathan’s face. “What do you need with him? You have all the magic that anyone could possibly want—”

  �
�Caveat: it’s not life magic,” he said pedantically. “It runs things, not people, but I see your point. I could buy all the life magic I want with what I’ve collected here.”

  “Then why do you want him?”

  He looked at me like I was crazy. “Why do you think? I want his body.”

  Louis-Cesare shifted slightly, but he made no other sign that he’d heard. I, on the other hand, had had enough. I slugged Jonathan, as hard as I could, right across the face. It was fortunate for Efridis that she was no longer holding his head, or the force might have broken her wrist. It was fortunate for him that he was already dead, or he likely would have been.

  “You stupid bitch!” He spit out three teeth, but there was no other sign that anything had happened. No blood, no discoloration, no swelling. It was eerily similar to hitting a side of meat. “I think you broke my jaw!”

  “I’m going to break a lot more than that!”

  “Why?” He looked genuinely confused. “You asked a question; I answered it. It’s not like I don’t need one. Look at me! And his will never age.”

  “What?” I said, confused myself now.

  Jonathan looked at me. “Are you slow?”

  “What?”

  “Yes, I can see that you are. Okay, let’s see what I can do here.” He pointed at himself. “Me dead. Body fall apart. Need new one. He,” a finger pointed at Louis-Cesare, “has immortal body. Me take, live forever. Do you get it now? Or do I need to draw you a picture?”

  I just stared at him for a moment. And then I started to hit him again, but Louis-Cesare pulled me back. I made him work for it, because I really, really—

  “That’s why you were doing your experiments on the fey,” Louis-Cesare said. “They are body and soul combined, like vampires. You thought, if you could control one of them, you could control me.”

  Jonathan nodded. He didn’t smile; he probably couldn’t right now. But he seemed vaguely pleased that someone was following his logic.

  “Yes, exactly. I am—or was, before my recent, unfortunate demise—over nine hundred years old. Do you have any idea how much magic it requires to stay alive at that age? Let me clue you in—it’s a lot. It makes you have to do all kinds of things you don’t want to do, because if you don’t, you just stop living. You can’t spend your time on your experiments, like you’d prefer, because you’re constantly scrounging around for new sources of magic. And making deals with people to get it that you can’t get out of afterwards. It’s a lot like being in jail—