The Witch Watch

by Shamus Young

  “His own servants claim he will command the might of a nation,” she countered. “That sounds like more than a match for a few hundred men.”

  “Then you know more than I’ve been told,” the Major replied skeptically. “And perhaps more than is true.”

  “Are you really suggesting that I’m in alliance with him?” she asked with such abrupt fury that Major Jack flinched. “I shot one of his men last night. In public.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said hastily, “I’m not suggesting you’re in league with the Dark Lord, as it were. But his servant may have misled you.”

  “He was good enough to announce the attack and thus bring us here to challenge him, rather than taking us by surprise. Would he have done so if he doubted his ability to win in an open battle against a prepared enemy? That would have been foolish and reckless of him, and therefore out of character.”

  Jack considered this for a moment before replying, “You say he will command the might of a nation. What do you suppose that means? He’s stolen the loyalty of many, but mostly the wealthy and powerful. There is power in that, but you don’t win battles with bankers and barristers.”

  “Historically, the truly great challenges have come from necromancers who command armies of the undead. The knowledge of powers so broad always dies with their master, but evil men rise, and sooner or later the old secrets are again unraveled. I expect that is what we are facing.”

  “It would take many graveyards to fill out such a force. We have no reports of empty graves, anywhere in the realm. I can’t believe he could marshal a force to challenge our army without creating at least the rumor of necromancy. And you said yourself in the past that it requires vigor to animate them. We should also have reports of slain animals.”

  “True,” Alice conceded. “It would be hard to conceal the building of an army, even if it were done gradually over time. But not impossible. So either our foes are cunning enough to conceal the raising of a great number of undead, or they are foolish enough to warn us of their assault ahead of time and then show up with insufficient numbers to win. Which outcome seems most likely to you?”

  Jack conceded the point with silence. Finally he spoke, “Well, if he has nothing more than marching undead, then he’s chosen a poor battleground. I’d rather face undead in these narrow streets than have them coming at us out of the dark, out in the wilderness.”

  The men nodded at this with approval. To the Major’s annoyance, Gilbert was nodding as well.

  Jack’s anger was kindled again. “As for your companions: The abomination will be destroyed, as he should have been weeks ago. The boy – I’m assuming this is the boy who created the abomination - will stand trial for his crime.”

  “No! I need them both if we’re to save the princess!”

  “That excuse has kept this abomination whole for a long while, and yet the princess remains absent.”

  “But now I know where she is!” Alice pleaded.

  Jack opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment a horse came galloping to them and the rider called to him, “Major! We’ve spotted a group of abominations. They’re on Shoreditch High Street, heading towards us.”

  “How many?” the Major shouted back.

  “Less than thirty.”

  The men seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief.

  Jack scoffed, “That’s not enough to enter the city, much less breach the palace. Is that the only group? Are you certain?”

  The rider nodded, “All roads north have been scouted, and that was the only force we found.”

  Jack shouted to his men, “We’ll make our stand here. Ride to the palace and tell the general. I don’t expect he’ll see the need to send any of his forces away to help us here. We have two hundred men, which is more than adequate.”

  The scout nodded and rode off. Jack mounted his own horse and addressed the men in his booming voice, “Hold this street! Rifles first. When you’ve expended your rifle, throw it down and use your truncheon. Remember these are the unliving, not men. They feel no pain. They fear no foe. They will beg no quarter, and neither will they offer one. They have no blood to spill. But shatter their bones and they will fall.”

  He paused and judged the faces of his men. Not liking what he saw he continued, “Do not fear them! There are ten of you for every corpse our foe commands. We are the fortunate ones! Thousands of our countrymen stand ready at the gates of Buckingham Palace! Let us be greedy with the glory, and leave them with nothing but bone dust!”

  The men cheered at this. Jack lifted his head in pride and held his sword over his head. “God save the Queen!” he cried.

  The men shouted this back at him, and began marching forward at his command.

  “He’s a good officer,” Gilbert said quietly.

  The Major gave orders to the men guarding Alice and her companions, “Remain here. If any of them try to escape, kill all alike.”

  “I still don’t like him, though,” Gilbert added quickly.

  The remaining men grumbled at their assigned task. They were disappointed that they would be unable to acquire any glory when it seemed to be available so cheaply.

  Alice held up her ethergram for the other two to see. The needle was moving. It had been pointing due north, but was now creeping towards the northwest, where Jack and his men were heading.

  The sun had now faded and - much to Simon’s delight – the streets were left to the warm glow of electric lights.

  Their captors grew restless. Having been denied participation in the battle, they at least wanted to see it play out. At first they simply edged forward to the bend in the road so that they could see the army. As it grew more distant they began to follow, until soon they were openly marching behind, leading the prisoners towards the battle.

  The army halted and drew a firm line across the street. In the distance, slow shapes crept out from the darkness. The streets beyond were unlit.

  Alice ascended the steps of a nearby building to get a better view of the proceedings. Her captors tried to prevent her, then thought better of it, and followed her up.

  “Our foe has chosen his position well after all,” Gilbert said. His sudden voice startled a few of their guards, who had been growing increasingly nervous. “The narrow way favors the smaller force.”

  Despite the advantage offered by the street, it looked like the odds were overwhelmingly on the side of the Queen. The British soldiers stretched all the way across the street, their lines several men deep. Their foes were just a handful of bodies, shuffling implacably southward. Bits of armor rested on their bones. In their hands they held simple weapons, most likely clubs and swords. In the center of this procession was a small robed figure, the late Lord Mordaunt. He appeared very small, and unthreatening.

  The two forces stopped some thirty paces distant from one another. Then a low, echoing voice flowed over the crowd. The voice was calm. It did not shout, yet the words traveled far, even to Alice and her companions far in the rear.

  “I am your Sovereign, the King Mordaunt. I have come to set my kingdom in order. It is not my wish to harm any of my own subjects. Stand aside and you will all be spared.”

  “Surely he doesn’t mean to bluff his way to Buckingham?” Alice wondered.

  “His voice is even more terrible in death!” Simon cried. The men guarding them seemed to share this sentiment.

  “How does he make his voice travel so?” asked Gilbert in annoyance. “Mine doesn’t do that.”

  “FIRE!” boomed the defiant voice of Major Stanway at the front of the formation.

  The British rifles rang out, coughing a burst of smoke into the air. The shots seemed to strike the undead closest to Mordaunt. Many of his skeletal servants jerked at the impact. One collapsed, and one was deprived of an arm. The rest were unperturbed.

  More shots rang out, and the skeletons gathered in around their master, shielding him.

  “This might be a short battle,” chucked one of the guards in feigned disappointment
.

  “It may,” said Alice, “But our foe still has the use of his own magic. We may lose a few men while he expends himself.”

  As the volley of gunfire ended, the soldiers prepared their truncheons. As they stepped forward, Mordaunt rose up above the battlefield, hovering over his own forces. He lifted a gnarled hand over his head and cast it down again, bringing with it a handful of fire. The flame landed in the midst of the men, lighting the British lines on fire and tossing men into the air like leaves caught by the wind.

  “Oh!” Alice exclaimed, “Or perhaps he will expend all of his power in a single strike.”

  Mordaunt did it again, despite her prediction. Then a third and a forth ball of fire struck the men. There was confusion and screaming now, and smoke was quickly shrouding the battlefield.

  “Surely that’s the last of them!” she exclaimed.

  More fire came in answer. Once the British lines had broken, Mordaunt began to hurl bolts of lightning to slay the scattered men.

  “This is impossible!” cried Alice. “How can he continue to expend so much power? Even the great liches of old had limits.”

  The fleeing solders were now running past their small group, weeping and beating at the flames. “To the palace!” they screamed.

  Mordaunt continued, despite her earlier incredulity. The battlefield was now behind an opaque curtain of smoke. Like a storm cloud, it flashed with brilliant white veins of lightning and roared with energy. The air was filled with flying debris.

  Then from out of the tempest, Mordaunt unleashed his forces. Corpses rushed out of the cloud, cutting men down as they ran.

  The guards looked at each other nervously and then at Alice. Then they looked out at the rampaging dead in the streets.

  “If you run now you might make it to the castle where you can help defend the Queen,” Gilbert suggested.

  The courage of the men had been crumbling in the face of such a sudden defeat. Once Gilbert offered them a way think of fleeing as honorable, they set to it with all their strength.

  Gilbert looked north to the looming cloud. “Do we have a plan?” he asked quickly.

  “No,” Alice replied.

  “Right,” said Simon, who took off running with the other two at his heels.

  “We need to get out of this alley of death,” Gilbert suggested.

  They plunged down a side street, which was devoid of streetlights. They hurried into the curtain of darkness and then stopped, reluctant to run further for fear of finding a wall with their noses. Alice took up a wooden pole that had been dropped by the fleeing soldiers. She reached up and lit it with her own fire, and held it out in front of them.

  “You seem to have set our flag on fire,” said Gilbert.

  “Oh! I do feel bad about that,” Alice said, looking up at the burning Union Jack.

  The screams of the soldiers had faded. They were all routed or slain. Skeletons were running through the street behind them, oblivious to their own burning.

  “One of them saw your torch!” Simon said nervously.

  A flaming skeleton had broken away from the group and was drawn towards Alice. Gilbert intercepted it and struck it with his fists. The two bony gladiators then stood face to face and traded blows.

  “This isn’t really getting us anywhere,” Alice said after the contest had gone on for some time.

  “I don't have a weapon,” Gilbert explained. “I don’t know what else to do with this beast.”

  “Snap its neck,” Alice suggested.

  “Or crush the skull,” Simon added.

  Gilbert grappled with it, but found it difficult to make any progress. His foe was wearing metal armor about his head and shoulders that seemed to have been designed to prevent exactly what they had suggested. Finally he gave up, tackled it, and began slamming its head into the ground.

  The skeleton had stopped burning by this time, as everything flammable on its body had already been consumed. It was now blackened and smoking.

  “This isn’t working either,” Gilbert said after the pounding had become tiresome. After some additional struggle, he managed to pull its helmet off.

  “Hold it still!” Simon said, drawing a bit of chalk out of his pocket.

  Gilbert wrapped his great arms and legs around his foe, pinning it in place. Then Simon drew near and timidly scratched a pair of symbols into the ash on the forehead. It took a few tries, as the creature’s struggles foiled his attempts at writing. Finally he completed the marks, and the entire thing fell apart into an arrangement of inert bones.

  “That’s quite a trick!” Alice exclaimed.

  “Binding symbols. Or rather, unbinding symbols in this case. We used them to destroy reanimated dogs and pigs after an experiment was done. I don’t think they work on revived beings like Gilbert, but they’re useful for enslaved dead.”

  Alice breathed a sigh of relief. “If I ever get the chance to rebuild my library, I’m going to start with your knowledge!”

  “I think the new ‘king’ has passed. Are we after him towards the palace?” said Gilbert as he brushed himself off

  “Not yet,” Alice said. “There’s no sense in confronting him until we have some idea how to survive the encounter. Let’s look over the battlefield and see what we can find.”

  They retraced their steps, following the trail of bodies and burned wreckage northward. They found a small number of wounded among the dead, most of whom had escaped the flames by hiding beneath their compatriots. The group stopped to help these men and give them what small comfort they could.

  They found Major Jack near the start of the battle. His horse had bolted away from the flames and into the enemy, where it had been slain by Mordaunt’s servants. Jack had been pinned under the beast when it fell, and was struggling to free himself.

  Gilbert managed to lift the horse well enough that Jack could squeeze out. He made some sort of grunt to convey grudging thanks, and then propped himself up against a nearby wall. He gasped and coughed for a few minutes. He tended the wounds on one shoulder where the dead had hacked at him after he fell.

  “Did you know?” he asked Alice once he’d regained some strength.

  “Know?”

  “About the fire. All his power. In all my time with the ministry I never heard of such a thing,” he said gravely.

  “Of course I didn’t know! I’d never heard of such a thing either. Not from my father, not from any of the books in our library. This is something new.”

  “What if he was using a feeding circle?” Simon suggested.

  “I thought of that as well,” Alice said. "If he’d drawn a circle nearby and put some people into it, then he could have fed his magic from them. But the power he unleashed… that would have taken many, many people. He continued using the power, even when moving. The street would have needed to be lined with feeding circles, which would have needed to be filled with people.”

  “What about inside the houses?” Gilbert suggested.

  Alice looked down the street doubtfully. “A wizard must be close to a feeding circle to benefit from it. Do you imagine that Mordaunt could have hidden a feeding circle in every house from here to the palace? And then filled them all with victims? And then assigned people to keep the victims contained? Without being noticed?”

  “I don’t know how it works,” Gilbert said with a shrug. “I was only guessing.”

  “What do you plan to do next?” asked the Major.

  “I don’t know,” Alice admitted. “I am exhausted and can barely summon the strength to produce worthwhile thoughts. Look at how my hands are shaking. And I am so hungry and thirsty.”

  “Why?” asked Gilbert.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We barely took part in the fight. We ran a short distance and walked back here. That’s hardly strenuous exertion by your standards.”

  Alice considered this. “I don’t know. Perhaps the lack of sleep over the last few days?”

  “It just seemed sudden to me,” sai
d Gilbert. “Perhaps I’m simply forgetting what it’s like to be alive.”

  “No,” said Simon slowly. “I think you are right. This fatigue is rather sudden. I feel it as well, even though I was hale before the battle.”

  Jack coughed. “I’m wounded, so I’m not at all surprised to find myself spent. But you are the picture of health, Alice. The same is true of your friend.” Jack then struggled to his feet with Alice’s help. He found the leg that had been pinned under the horse could not bear any weight. He began picking among the debris in search of something that might be used as a crutch.

  “Now that I think of it,” Simon said thoughtfully, “This feels a bit like being inside a feeding circle myself. All those days in the dungeons, trapped in a cage. It was much more intense then, but this feels similar.”

  “What do you make of it?” asked Jack.

  Simon shrugged. Alice shook her head. Gilbert was busy re-arming himself and gathering supplies from among the fallen.

  At length the Major began hobbling around the battlefield, gathering the remaining men and getting them on their feet. “So you’re off to the palace?” he asked as Alice and her friends began to leave.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Perhaps you should see to the Princess Sophie, if you still know her whereabouts.”

  “She and Prince Leopold are held at the home of Brooks. The place is guarded by many men. Too many for our small group.” Alice then briefly explained the events of the previous evening.

  Jack relented at this and let them go on their way.

  Buckingham

  XI

  “I don’t know!” Alice cried with exasperation. This was the fifth time Gilbert had asked what she planned to do when they reached Buckingham Palace.

  They reached the palace at the end of a long road of destruction. Apparently the battle they witnessed was the first of many. They examined the dead as they moved, but it was rare for them to find any enemy casualties. At one point they found a skeleton that had been broken in half but not destroyed, and it had continued to crawl along the ground using its arms. Gilbert sat on it while Simon destroyed it with sorcery. They had to route around one area where firefighters were struggling to contain a blaze, and another street that had been thoroughly barricaded.