The Dire King

by William Ritter

  “Sir,” I said, “may I ask, where did all of these”—I hesitated—“people?”

  “People will do.”

  “Where did all of these people come from?”

  “The first batch came from the station house. The rest have been trickling in as word reached them in the more distant pockets of New Fiddleham’s supernatural community.”

  “Might I suggest offering them the third floor to spread out a bit?” I said, as something silvery zipped and darted around my head, swimming through the air like a fish through water.

  “We did,” Jenny called over her shoulder.

  “It got crowded up there,” Jackaby added grimly. “And the centaurs do not associate peaceably with ipotanes, which is ironic, considering how much they have in common. Hey, you! Aziza! I see you there. Kindly do not shake out your pipe onto my Bibles!”

  This last he directed to a hairy little man with jet-black skin who sat atop the pile on the desk. He was not much taller than the books on which he perched. Aziza nodded understandingly and then proceeded to tip his pipe onto a copy of the King James anyway.

  Jackaby took a deep, steadying breath. “We’re working on quadrants. Bipedal versus quadrupedal, trooping versus solitary, truculent versus, well, less prone to pitch a battle ax through a laboratory window.” He glared meaningfully at a stocky, bearded fellow by his elbow, who at least had the decency to shuffle his feet and look abashed. “Your room is currently housing avian anthropoids, by the way. You may need to wash your bedsheets later.”

  “Why are they all here, sir?” I asked.

  “Spade,” grunted Jackaby. “Miss Lee liberated Spade’s detainees per my request, but Mayor Spade was none too happy to see them go. According to a few of the first arrivals, he was downright livid. He apparently tried to block their release, but Marlowe stepped in on their behalf. That might have been the end of it, but Spade wasn’t about to let me walk away from this without making my life harder. He added an amendment to his original edict then and there, a clause granting the ‘undesirables’ one sanctuary in the city—one alone. The word went out hours ago. Care to guess which building he decided to declare an official paranormal refuge?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “That’s right. This is me kidding. I’m knee deep in gnomes because I’m just so much fun at parties. Hey! I saw that! No biting your fellow refugees! We’ve been over this!”

  “I had no idea New Fiddleham was so diverse,” said Charlie, peering around the room in awe. “I always thought there were very few of—us.”

  “That would be the glamour inhibitor,” said Jackaby. “I put it in for Rook when I had the door redone. It will wear off in a bit, but when they passed through the entryway it temporarily rendered their guises null. You are seeing them as I see them—as they really are. Well, except for the null.” He nodded toward the man whose face I couldn’t seem to focus on. “One can never see a null as he is, because strictly speaking, a null isn’t.” The null waved at us sheepishly from the corner. I think.

  “I cannot say that I am comfortable with your system,” Charlie mumbled. “Some of us have good reason to keep our identities to ourselves.”

  “Did you get the impression that anybody in this room was comfortable at the moment, Mr. Barker?” Jackaby asked, his eye twitching just a little. “They were warned—they came in anyway. Well, some of them did. Half a dozen had inhibitions about the inhibitor and decided to favor secrecy over sanctuary. Thank goodness they did. We’d be overrun.”

  “You really think we can keep them all safe?”

  “No!” A hint of manic laughter crept into Jackaby’s voice. “Not remotely! I can scarcely keep you safe, let alone babysit every satyr and siren in the city! I can’t exactly turn them out, though, can I? Not with the mayor’s thugs patrolling the streets.”

  “I think it’s good,” I said. Jenny turned to me with skepticism in her eyes. “I know this may not be ideal, but they need help. That’s what we do, isn’t it? We help people. I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that we did what we could.”

  Jenny shrugged. “You do remember that there are birdfolk nesting in your bedchamber?”

  “I will suffer less discomfort knowing that a lot of innocent people don’t have to go home tonight to find hunters waiting on their doorsteps.”

  “No, that’s true,” said Jackaby, nodding toward the entryway. His expression had suddenly lost a degree of happiness that it did not have to spare. “They will find one waiting on ours.”

  The entire assembly turned at the sound of the door thudding open and a booming voice erupting from the doorway. “Hot damn! Ain’t you all a sight!”

  I felt a lump drop to the pit of my stomach. Second only to the actual giant in height, Hank Hudson was a mountain of a man, dressed in thick hides and heavy boots. His left arm ended just past the elbow, concluding with a curved metal hook, like a storybook pirate. Hudson was a friend and an ally, but he was also an expert hunter with a taste for paranormal prey. Sometimes his paranormal prey got a taste for him, too. That hand had gone into the gullet of a fifty-foot dragon the last time we had met.

  He stood in the doorway with a smile spreading from one end of his bushy auburn beard to the other. “How come I wasn’t invited to yer shindig, chum?” he called over the crowd to Jackaby. “You know I like me a rare breed!”

  Chapter Ten

  With Hank Hudson in tow, Jackaby wound through the crowded house. Jenny abandoned her efforts to preserve a small statue of a man with a bird’s head and swept after them, and Charlie and I followed close on their heels.

  Jackaby’s personal library was not as large as the public libraries I have known, but walking into it, I still found myself greeted by thousands of volumes, a collection full of rare and obscure works unrivaled by anything I had ever seen. My employer’s shelving method was maddening, to be sure, with books organized completely illogically, although Jackaby insisted they were set according to supernatural potency and color of aura. My eyesight being limited to prosaic things like light and color and items occupying actual physical space, his methodology was less than helpful—but still, Jackaby’s library was a marvel. I breathed in the scent of paper and leather and binding glue as we filed inside.

  There was something else in the air today. Something musty with a hint of axle grease and copper. I could tell that Charlie had caught the scent as well, and I followed his eyes to a band of mottled gray-green creatures loitering around the alcove window seats. They were about the height and build of muscular eight-year-old boys with gangly arms and ill-fitting clothes. Each of the sinewy little men carried a weapon. These ranged from a bandolier of daggers to a massive blunderbuss that looked more like a small cannon in the hands of the diminutive figure.

  “Chief Nudd.” Jackaby gave a civil nod to the goblin in the center, who was wearing a black top hat with a spray of cardinal feathers tucked neatly in the band.

  Nudd tipped the showy hat and gave me a glance. “Ye’ve kept yer new Douglas around, I see. Have nae gotten ’er turned inter a bird or anyfin’ yet. You goin’ easy on thiss’n?”

  “Mm? Oh, yes. Miss Rook is hale and whole.”

  I nodded. “I was dead for a short while, but that was weeks ago. Very kind of you to inquire, Mr. Nudd.”

  He smiled up at me with all his jagged teeth, a goblin’s most affable expression—which was, as far as I could tell, indistinguishable from a goblin’s most menacing expression.

  “Do pardon us,” Jackaby said. “I just mean to have a quiet word with my associates. The house is a bit more . . . occupied than I generally prefer.”

  “Know the feelin’. Yer bookroom is fair an’ all, but th’ twain keeps watchin’ me, and all them nimmies is righ’ unsettlin’ after a time.”

  “Twain? Nimmies?” I glanced around. “I didn’t see anyone else in—oh my!” A woman’s face, which had moments
ago appeared to be carved into the side of one of the heavy bookshelves, leaned forward and blinked out at us with eyes like glittering sapphires.

  “Oh, that is a bit off-putting, isn’t it,” said Jenny. “Is that what it’s like when I come through a wall unannounced?”

  The nymph peered at her mournfully for a few seconds and then turned to Jackaby.

  “You’re not wearing the hat I made for you,” she said in a whisper like the wind through leaves.

  “Erm, yes. No. I am not, actually. There was an incident.”

  She sighed and rolled her eyes before falling backward, melting into the woodwork entirely.

  “Wood nymphs,” said Jackaby.

  “Not a real cheery lot, them,” observed Hudson.

  “In retrospect, a library is a rather somber locale for their kind. A bit like housing a man in a graveyard. Well, a bit like housing a man in a graveyard in which his people’s bones have been mashed to a pulp and reconstituted into slim sheets, onto which one has scribbled a lot of silly words with pictures of monks and satyrs in the margins.”

  Even with unexpected guests coming out of the woodwork, the library was still an oasis of calm. I had always found it comforting—so long as I did not allow my curiosity to draw me back into the Dangerous Documents section. Something indescribably eerie lay in those foggy depths at the end of a mazelike series of bookshelves. I much preferred keeping to the front of the library.

  “All right, then, straight to the back,” said Jackaby. “We need to talk.”

  “Secret meetin’, then?” Nudd said, scrambling away from his horde to join us. “This yer trusted few? Inner circly sorta thing, nae? A’righ’. I’m wit’ ye. ’Bout time ye took command.”

  “What? No,” Jackaby said. “I’m not assuming command of anything. God knows why, but these fools are hardy enough to keep my company even in the face of this mess, so I simply intend to put their foolhardy company to good use.”

  “Aye. Tha’s the inner circly bit.”

  Jackaby shook his head. “Come on, then.”

  We followed through tight corridors filled with an inexplicable fog of dread until they gave way to an opening entirely enclosed by bookshelves, with just enough space for a single oval reading table. The table had a small oil lamp in the center, which Jackaby lit. There were only two chairs, but there was room enough for four or five to stand around the table comfortably. The six of us did our best.

  “So, this is the Dangerous Documents section.” I glanced at the spines and scrolls around us. Some were sealed with iron clasps and heavy locks; others had been chained directly to their shelves. Those that sat freely seemed to have edged away from their more intimidating colleagues.

  “Yes,” Jackaby said. “Don’t worry, they won’t bite. Well, none of the ones on that end, anyway. You can take a look, but nobody do anything colossally ignorant like read them out loud. Or let them read you out loud.”

  “Okay,” said Hudson, scratching his beard with his hook. “Care to tell us why we’re here?”

  “I have no idea why you’re here,” said Jackaby. “I understand why the fairies and sprites and the other oddlings have come—they’re here for my protection, what little of it I have to offer. You’re human, though, Hank. You were in no danger. You could be anywhere right now, so why are you here?”

  “It don’t take an expert to read the signs, chum. Things ain’t right. You got a way of makin’ things right, and I aim ta help. Last time I got involved, it was me who made ’em wrong in the first place—so if you’re fixin’ this, I’m fixin’ to fix it with ya.”

  “You know we’re with you, too, sir,” I said. Charlie nodded.

  “It’s only recently I’ve been able to go out into the world again,” said Jenny. “I’m certainly not letting somebody go destroying that world before I’ve had a chance to enjoy it.”

  “What about you?” Jackaby turned to Nudd.

  “My horde’s got one foot in this world, t’other foot in th’ Annwyn. Bin feelin’ th’ tremors shakin’ both sides fer a long time noo.”

  “But your horde is seeded hundreds of miles away. Spade wasn’t about to find you any time soon, and even if he had, as you say, you’ve got one foot in the Annwyn. You could always escape to the other side long before he posed any threat. Even if the worst came to pass, even if the earth and the Annwyn tore each other apart—you owe no allegiance to either faction. You could stand to the side until the dust cleared. So why seek me out? There’s no profit in joining the fray.”

  “Nae. An’ it wouldn’ae be our firs’ time pickin’ o’er the dead after a battle. I’ll take no shame in it iffin’ it comes tae tha’, neither, but there’s profit in protectin’ an investment. We’s invested.”

  Jackaby raised an eyebrow. “Invested in New Fiddleham? Brigand or not, you sound almost sentimental.”

  Nudd gave a barking laugh. “Gotta lotta contacts in this city, t’ be sure—but it’s nae New Fiddleham we’s invested in.”

  Jackaby looked confused.

  “I believe he means you, sir,” I said. “Everyone in this room is invested in you.”

  Jackaby looked deeply uncomfortable as the room quieted, heads nodding in agreement.

  “Even him?” Hudson broke the hush. He pointed up to the shelf behind Jackaby. A man not more than six inches tall, his body covered in dust brown, woolly fur, sat at the top, dangling his feet casually off the shelf. He looked a bit like a mild-mannered chipmunk and an accountant fused into a single body. His face was round and rosy, bordered by downy tufts of hair around his ears and a stubbly beard that circled his chin.

  “Ah,” said Jackaby. “That little fellow is an . . . actually, I don’t know.” He turned his head this way and that. “I don’t know you,” he told the creature.

  “Humans don’t,” it said. Its voice was small and unassuming.

  “No, I mean, I don’t believe I’ve even read about you, which is—I must say—rather uncommon. You have an exceptional aura, though, has anyone ever told you? Unrestrainedly brilliant. A rather zoetic bluish-red. But not really red, though, is it? Nor blue. What are you?”

  “Half of what I once was,” said the creature humbly. “More than you will ever be,” it added quietly.

  “Ach, watch yerself. ’Tis a twain,” Nudd interjected. “Powerful strong magic, th’ twain, but beholden tae none but they’s own. Unseelie as they come.”

  “It’s an Unseelie fairy?” I said, taking an involuntary step backward—directly into Hudson. He steadied me with a hand on my shoulder.

  “Unseelie. Seelie. Old words,” said the twain, softly. “They don’t mean as much as they once did. War changes things.”

  “Some things don’t change,” said Jackaby. “And this isn’t a war! Not yet. Not if we can help it.”

  “You’re hesitant,” said the twain. “Good. But this war began a long time ago. You have already seen new casualties, housed the refugees, met the generals on the front lines.”

  Jackaby’s brow knit. His hands were clenched at his sides.

  “I’m curious,” the twain replied. “When you finally decide to join the fight, will you know what you are fighting for? Choose carefully. The spear grips the hand, as the saying goes. How will you plan mankind’s victory against the otherworld when you’re asking for advice from the undead and goblins?”

  “Oi!” Nudd cut in. “’Tis nae goblins tha’ drove all these twallies outta their holes an’ inta this’n. It’s humans ye need tae watch out for. Goblins ye can trust.”

  “With all things save one’s coin purse,” the twain said, evenly.

  “Oi! Mind yer gob. Goblins pay their debts. We’re nae the cheats, here. Humanfolk, now there’s a den o’ snakes.”

  “Izzat so?” Hudson raised a bushy eyebrow.

  “Aye. My horde built a tower once. Human with big fat pockets wants a
tower right in the center of New Fiddleham, right? Wants it a hundred stories tall from ground tae gables—a hundred human stories, mind ya, nae goblin stories. Tha’s twice as big! But we built it, all the same. Done! Greasy munter refused to pay!”

  “You built a tower in the middle of New Fiddleham?” Hudson asked. “A hundred stories high?”

  “Oh, aye. Fine bit o’ craftsmanship, too.”

  “I been to every corner of New Fiddleham,” said Hudson. “There ain’t no hundred-story towers around here.”

  “Ach, ya daft humanfolk na’er use yer nappers. Got ta think like a goblin. Couldn’ae build a tower what rose up into th’ sky in th’ middle o’ a big city wi’out raising all kind o’ unwanted attention—so we just flipped th’ plans. Goblins is clever folk. Ground is still ground, gables is still gables, we just built th’ thing down instead o’ up.”

  “You built . . . down?” I said. “You mean you dug it into the earth? How is that a tower and not a tunnel?”

  “Ach, tha’s easy.” Nudd grinned with all his pointy teeth. “It’s got windows.”

  “If you don’t mind,” Jackaby interrupted. “What are you really doing here?” he asked the twain.

  “Watching,” it replied with a shrug. “Waiting.”

  Nudd snarled something that did not sound like respectable discourse, even for a goblin, and added, “Dinna trust a twain.”

  “Well,” said Jackaby, still addressing the twain, “make yourself useful or make yourself scarce.”

  “Scarce as scarce can be,” said the twain, his gaze hollow. “I am the last and the only.” And in a blink he was suddenly gone. Jackaby’s eyes darted around the room, and then he scowled. It was his grudgingly impressed scowl.

  “Instantaneous transtemporal dislocation,” he said. “No incantations or powders. You weren’t kidding. That’s serious raw magic.”

  “Told ye,” said Nudd. “Dinnae need charms or curses, them ones. No fiddlin’ wi’ chants or spellbooks. If they wants summat ta be, then it be. Give me th’ jeebies. Ye only ever see a twain at th’ big times.”