Dark Kingdoms

by Richard Lee Byers

  He made another right, then pulled up in front of a huge warehouse. There were no lights burning, but Quitman glimpsed a couple of shadowy figures standing near the door.

  "We're here," the driver said. "I need you to get your people hustling, so we can unload as fast as possible. My buddies and I have a bunch more pickups to make."

  "Certainly," Quitman said. For the next few minutes, he moved from one vehicle to the next, explaining the need for haste. Trying to calm frightened, bewildered children and the occasional half-hysterical member of his own team as well. Assisting in the work of gently shifting fragile young bodies. Making sure none of St. Mary's charts or medical supplies were left behind.

  He realized that the work was making him calmer, perhaps because with something useful to do he didn't feel quite so helpless against the catastrophe engulfing the city. At any rate, when the last of the gurneys and handcarts rolled toward the warehouse door and the vans pulled away, he almost felt regretful.

  "Nice going," said a deep, pleasant voice. His heart jolting, Quitman lurched around. Dunn stood just behind him, a hand-rolled cigarette smoldering in his mouth. "Sorry, Doc. Didn't mean to sneak up on you."

  The physician took a ragged breath. "That's all right. I'm just feeling a little rattled."

  "You and all the other sane people. Smoke? I can roll it for you."

  "No, thank you. How...how bad is this, really?"

  Dunn grinned. "It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from here. Seriously, Natchez is a war zone right now. I'm really glad your patients made it here in one piece. And you deserve a big hunk of the credit for that. Malcolm—your driver— told me that you had everybody and everything ready to go by the time he pulled up. And I saw how well you managed your people just now."

  The unexpected compliment made Quitman feel a little flustered. "Well.. .thank you."

  Tires squealing, a hatchback sedan rounded the turn and braked in front of the warehouse. Its headlights were on high-beam, and Quitman squinted and raised his arm against the glare, though it didn't seem to bother Dunn. A short, pudgy man in coveralls, a woman perhaps three inches taller and forty pounds heavier, and two little boys scrambled out of the car. The man and the boys looked dazed, the woman outraged, as if the anarchy consuming Natchez were a personal insult.

  "Is this—" the pudgy man began.

  "We're the Schotts," the woman said harshly, cutting him off. "Reverend Harper said that this was where to come." She gave the pudgy man a glare. "Assuming this fool read the map right."

  "This is the shelter," said Dunn. "It'll help us out if you don't leave your car right in front of the door."

  "I'll move it," sighed Mr. Schott.

  "Bring the luggage, too," the woman told him. "I'm going to get the boys inside." When she looked at the children, her scowl gave way to a look of tender concern. She herded them toward the door, and Mr. Schott trudged back around the nose of the hatchback.

  Quitman frowned up at Dunn. "I thought this was a shelter for patients with special medical needs. Those people look healthy enough to me."

  Dunn shrugged. "I didn't hand out all the invitations, Doc, so I don't know the story on that particular happy family. Just that they really are supposed to be here, or they wouldn't have known to come. But I guarantee you, your patients will be taken care of."

  "I'm sure they will," Quitman said. "I didn't mean to imply anything different. It just seemed strange, and—" He grimaced. "Listen to me, I'm babbling."

  "Considering the pressure you've been under, it's no wonder. Let's get you inside, so you can sit down and take a breather."

  The doctor shook his head. "I'm all right. But actually, I should go in, to help my team get their section ofthe ward set up."

  "Whatever you say," the FBI agent replied. He took a final drag from his cigarette, then tossed it away. It hit the pavement witha scatter of orange embers. "After you."

  Beyond the entrance was a hallway constructed of bare planks, sheets of plywood, and egg^cartOn-style soundproofing, which made a right-angle turn several yards down. Between the; door and that point, two bare bulbs dangled from the ceiling. The passage had the look and the fresh sawdust smell of something that had just been slapped together.

  "Why did you people build this thing?" Quitman asked.

  "We were afraid that not everybody would make it to the shelter uninjured," Dunn replied, "and we didn't want kids looking in the door, seeing blood, and hearing screams. They might have been Scared to come inside."

  They rounded the turn. A door stood a few feet ahead. Despite the soundproofing, Quitman now caught a muffled jumble of noise, indecipherable yet somehow disturbing, just as he smelled a hint of blood and a rank, zoo-cage odor.

  When he opened the door, the sound resolved itself into shrieking and an oddly cadenced chanting. He stepped into, a high-ceilinged, cavernous space. In the foreground, huge, wolfish things, prowling for the most part on their hind legs, were separating children from their caretakers with savage efficiency. His own staff lay in gory pieces on the floor along with a number of Other adult corpses. Mrs. Schott screamed, a monster swung its taloned arm in a backhand blow, and her head flew from her meaty shoulders.

  An inhumanly large and powerful hand grabbed Quitman by the forearm. He looked up into the amber-eyed countenance of a beast-thing, its muzzle pitted with sores and its breath foul as a sewer. The doctor felt a scream catch in his throat. As easily as his prisoner might have picked up a doll, the ogre hoisted him toward its stained, jagged fangs.

  "It's okay, Woundraper," said Dunn from behind him. "I'll look after the doc."

  Grunting, the monster dropped Quitman, who found that his legs, were too vveak and rubbery to support him. Dunn grabbed him and held him up. The beast-thing stalked away.

  "Did you take a good look at this?" Dunn asked. Shifting Quitman almost as effortlessly as the towering Woundraper had, he directed his; captive?s gaze toward the center of the room. Now Quitman perceived what happened to the children after the lupine monsters tore them from their dying caretakers' arms. "Pretty efficient, isn't it ? Like a damn assembly line."

  Quitman told himself he was having a nightmare, but knew it wasn't so. Somehow, this obscenity was happening. And since the physician had arranged the exodus from St. Mary's, he was to blame, "If it makes you feel any better," said Dunn, "you're not going up there. For some weird-ass sorcery reason, the spooks can only use kids. Although I admit that something else kind of nasty is going to happen to you."

  It vaguely occurred to Quitman that he ought to try to wrench himself away from Dunn. But terror, guilt, and sheer bewilderment still had him paralyzed. "What?" he whimpered.

  Dunn gave him a slightly sheepish smile. "The thing is, this little dqg-and-pony show has kept me hopping all day. I haven't had anything to eat."

  FORTY-ONE

  A once-dapper fellow in a cravat, gleaming red satin vest, and cutaway coat reeled down the street, hands outstretched, his face frayed to rags from his hairline to his handlebar mustache. The Maelstrom shrieked and gusted, and his left arm shredded into tatters of ectoplasm also.

  It looked to Montrose as if the blinded wraith was done for, and with a twinge of regret, he started to pass him by. But Louise took the poor, unraveling creature by the shoulder, and, shouting over the wailing of the wind, cried, "Your Haunt! Is it nearby?"

  The eyeless ghost gave a jerky nod. "Old boarding house," he croaked. "Blue door."

  Montrose peered about. Even for wraith eyes, it was difficult to make out colors in the swirling murk of the storm. But after a second he saw a derelict three-story wooden building with flakes of pale blue pigment still clinging to its door. "This way," he said.

  As Louise guided the blind wraith forward, a round Nihil dilated in front of her. A pale, plump worm of a Spectre, its twin heads whispering maledictions, writhed from the opening. Montrose drove his rapier into the creature at the point where its body forked, and it melted in ripples of black.


  Louise led her charge up the boarding house steps. "Here you are," she said, and pushed him through the substance of the door. If he could ride out the Maelstrom anywhere, it would be in the shelter of his own abode.

  Montrose and Louise trotted back up the street. The wind scraped at the Scot's skin, even through his porcelain mask and his voluminous, tattered Inquisitor's mantle. His Shadow writhed inside him.

  The two ghosts negotiated a twist in the road. Half a block farther on, beside the inky Mississippi and the rampart of murk extending above it, was the Green Head. Several of his irregulars were just emerging from the dilapidated shack.

  To the Scot's surprise, the mercenaries wore the same emerald sashes as the Governors' Legionnaires. During his time as their commander, they'd scorned such regimentation. Evidently something had altered their perspective.

  But whatever it was, it wasn't important now. He shouted, "Hey!" None of the ruffians turned. Evidently they hadn't heard him over the cry of the Maelstrom. Striding forward, Louise hurrying along at his side, he unlatched the cowling on his Lantern of Truth. Perhaps the eerie blue light would capture the men's attention.

  "Stop!" cried a familiar voice.

  Montrose whirled to see Valentine, now clad in ragged but conventional modern clothing rather than motley, scurrying from an alley with a thin, brown-haired little girl at his heels. Both the dwarf and his companion were marked with white, half- healed cuts and scrapes.

  The vision Montrose had seen in the Tempest, the confirmation of Valentine's betrayal, replayed itself before his inner eye, and he shivered with the lust for vengeance. In the final analysis, of course, his mission was what truly mattered now, but surely he had time for both. He could destroy the jester in a matter of moments and still catch up with the soldiers.

  He raised the darksteel blade and dashed forward. Louise, who had heard his tale of Valentine's treachery, ran after him. The jester recoiled but the Cavalier knew there was no way his ungainly, short-legged quarry could outdistance him.

  Valentine never even came close to it. After two steps, he caught his heel on an uneven spot in the brick pavement, and fell backward onto his butt. Grinning, Montrose aimed his blade for a thrust at the little man's chest.

  As his arm began to straighten, the little girl threw herself in front of his point. He only barely managed to avoid spitting her, "Stand aside," he said, his voice thick with malice.

  "No!" the girl replied. "Don't hurt him! He's trying to help you!" She had the high, breathy voice one might have expected, but with the subtle differences characteristic of child ghosts whose personalities had continued to mature after death.

  "I doubt that," Montrose said, maneuvering around her.

  "Please!" Valentine cried. "I admit, I did steal your journal—"

  "Yes/ said the Scot, "for easy money and advancement, after I offered you an honorable path to/the same benefits."

  "No!" Valentine said. "Only because I was afraid that otherwise Gayoso would toss me out in the cold." He grimaced. "But that doesn't matter now anyway. What does is that you can't hook up with those soldiers."

  "Oh, yes, I can. Despite your best efforts to see me executed for treason, the Deathlords have reinstated me. The soldiers of Natchez are mine to .command."

  "Not those soldiers! Their Shadows are in the driver's seat. They'd kill you in a heartbeat. Will you just listen for a minute.7 The conspiracy of Spectres that you were worried about is real. They turned Gay0S0: into a doomshade, too. He brought fake Pardoners into the Citadel, and forced his own troops—even your mercenaries— to start visiting them. A lot of Shellabarger and Mrs. Duquesne's troops went to confess to them, too. As a result, all those people came under their influence, and now the Spectres are working magick to control, them completely. Gayoso is going to use them to overthrow the other Anacreons."

  "How do you know all this?" Montrose asked.

  "Belinda—my friend here—and I stumbled onto the secret, that's; all. You don't want me to take the time to tell you the whole story, do you?"

  "No," said the Cavalier. "If you're lying to isolate me from the army and GayosOj you'd just concoct an additional falsehood." He glanced at Louise. "What do you think?"

  She shook her head. "I don't know. This man doesn't seem terribly wicked to me, but then, I don't know him. You'll have to decide."

  Frowning, Montrose pondered the situation. By his own admission, Valentine had already betrayed him once. The Stygian's vision had seemed to indicate that the little man had done it willingly, for profit. It was certainly plausible that, anticipating a handsome reward from the Atheist conspiracy, he intended further treachery now. And yet...

  Much as Montrose hated Valentine, Louise was correct. The jester seemed sincere. Visions and prophecies were notoriously prone to misinterpretation, and actually, the little man's claims jibed with everything Montrose had discovered on his previous sojourn in the Shadowlands, and all that Demetrius had mockingly revealed in Charon's vault.

  Mask and Scythe, should he believe the dwarf or not? He knew he had to decide quickly. He had a ghastly sense of onrushing disaster, of his last chance to avert it dwindling with every passing moment.

  Abruptly it occurred to him that it was the old Montrose, the embittered cynic who'd schemed his way up the Hierarchy to a high office in the Seat of Burning Waters, who invariably expected others to betray him. And Fate knew, many had: young Charles, VanLengen, and all the rest of their miserable ilk. But others had kept faith with him, Gordon, Airlie, and the other staunch friends whose arms decorated the stained-glass window above his sarcophagus in Edinburgh. Even in the bleak, Shadow-haunted afterlife, he'd eventually found true comrades—Mike, Artie, the other prisoners from the Artificers' pit, and especially Louise.

  I'here was no way to be certain whether Valentine was telling the truth or not, but Montrose did know that he didn't want to revert to the man he'd been before. Indeed, the notion revolted him. Lowering his rapier, he said, "I guarantee that if you're playing me false, you won't survive to collect your thirty pieces of silver."

  Valentine shuddered as tension flowed out of his muscles.

  "If we can't trust the soldiers," said Louise, "then I suppose we'll have to make our way into the Governors' Citadel, warn Shellabarger and Mrs, Duquesne, and break up the Spectres' ritual all by ourselves." She smiled crookedly, "Compared to invading the Isle of Sorrows and the Onyx Tower, it should be child's play."

  "We weren't quite so pressed for time then," Montrose replied, his auburn lovelocks and the folds of his voluminous black cloak fluttering in the wind. "Nor were we traveling through a Maelstrom. This particular operation would require a precocious child at the very least. Still, it would appear to be our only strategy."

  "Maybe we don't have to do it alone," Valentine said. "Supposedly some Les Invisibles types came up the river from New Orleans to help the Governors get rid of the Spectres. They haven't been to the phony Pardoners, so they shouldn't be under anybody's spell. Belinda and I didn't come down here to find you, milord Anacreon. We had no way to know you'd made it back from Stygia. We were hunting for those other guys. We thought they might be hanging around their boat."

  Still acutely conscious of the seconds ticking by, Montrose felt an urge to press on to the Citadel without further delay. Yet there seemed little question that a larger band would have a better chance of reaching and destroying the Spectres. Moreover, he: and his companions were still near the Mississippi. It wouldn't require much time to at least glance at the docks.

  As the four companions neared the water, the gale, blowing blistering hot one moment and freezing cold the next, grew even more abrasive than before. The wall of boiling darkness above the water appeared to stretch to the top of the sky. Occasionally Montrose thought he glimpsed unidentifiable but hideous shapes "Let's see if we can locate them," he said.

  forming and dissolving in the murk, like the monstrous phantasms that appeared in the mass of thunderheads in the Tempe
st.

  Someone had beached a keelboat on the shore. The Maelstrom gusted, and the shallow-draft vessel came to life. Cracking and crunching, the timbers ripped themselves apart, writhed about, and pressed themselves back together, creating the form of a troll-like figure which crouched on all fours.

  Swords upraised, intent on dispatching the monster before it could complete its transformation, Louise and Montrose ran at it. A round Nihil opened in front of the Scot, and a homed, skeletal doomshade popped up like a jack-in-the-box, brandishing a tomahawk in either hand.

  Montrose barely managed to arrest his forward momentum in time to keep the skeleton's first swing from cleaving his head. Dropping into a squat to duck beneath the doomshade's second blow, he counterattacked. His point chipped then grated along a rib. A hint of black fire oozed outward from the damage.

  Undeterred, the Spectre scrambled forward, hatchets whirling like the components of a machine. Retreating, Montrose kept himself out of range when possible, parried when the skeleton scuttled into striking distance, and waited for the right opening. Off to his right, gunfire banged and wood creaked and groaned. He assumed the latter noise was the sound of the boat-troll moving, but didn't dare glance away from his own opponent to confirm his guess.

  When the Spectre gave him the chance, he stepped forward with a stop thrust. His point caught the child of the Void squarely in the spinal column, just below the jaw. Its horned skull flew off its shoulders.

  Though suddenly awash in ripples of darkness, the skeleton continued forward, swinging. Montrose leaped aside and, now too close to use his sword easily, gave the Spectre a savate kick to the knee. It sprawled forward onto the ground, and he stabbed it until it dissolved.

  The Anacreon whirled. Crudely made and faceless, the wooden monster was about twenty feet tall. It lurched this way and that, swinging its simian arms at Louise. She danced about its feet, dodging the blows, chipping away at its lower legs with her saber. Bands of darkness flowed outward from the gashes. Periodically a splintery length of plank seemed to wrench itself free of the giant's body. The Sister of Athena was using her telekinesis against it, also.