Besieged

by Kevin Hearne

  “Master Shakespeare,” I whispered, “they are armed, and I do not doubt they will attack if provoked. We should probably keep our distance.”

  “How can you see anything, Marquis? I can only see shadows in the dark. My eyes need some assistance and I must see better; this could prove to be a fine provocative sauce for my play.”

  I could hardly cast night vision on him without revealing my abilities, so I sighed and said, “If we’re going to get any closer, I suggest you put out that torch.”

  I expected a protest but he complied instantly, jamming it into the mud behind me. He dearly wanted to get a closer look; to this point he hadn’t seen nearly so much as I had.

  We inched forward, ignoring the filthy ground, fascinated by the lights and the ritual playing out before us. I was fairly certain by then that I would have no official role to play as a protector of the earth, but playing protector to Shakespeare could be even more dangerous if we were discovered.

  The cauldron, I noticed, squatted in the middle of a crossroads, but the three-way sort to which Shakespeare had alluded earlier. What possible need the witches could have for Hecate’s personal appearance I could not imagine. Their hair was tied and queued behind them, and I perceived that they wore theatre masks straight out of ancient Greece, albeit with visages of bearded men strangely attached to what were plainly female bodies. Masked rites might make them Thracians, but if so their presence in England was especially bewildering.

  The only possible motivation I could come up with to conduct such a ritual near London was the upset or even overthrow of King James’s reign, but I was surprised that Greek cultists would care about it. Perhaps they didn’t care but were doing this on a mercenary basis—I had heard there were plots boiling all over the country, mostly by Catholics opposed to King James’s very existence. We were only twelve months away from the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot, after all. But if those witches were Catholic, then I was the son of a goat.

  “What token of hell is this?” Shakespeare breathed next to me, his eyes wide and fixed on the spectacle. We were crouched low to the ground on our haunches. “Bearded women cavorting and, and…” He fell speechless. Sometimes there simply aren’t words, even for him.

  “Draw no closer,” I warned him, listening to their chant. “Their words have changed. The invocation is set and now they are waiting.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “They are literally saying that they are waiting. Periménoume means ‘we wait’ in Greek, and they’re just repeating that, spinning around.”

  “For what do they wait?”

  “My guess would be a sacrifice. Maybe they know we’re here and they’re waiting for us to get closer, and then they will sacrifice us to their goddess.”

  Shakespeare did not fall for my scare tactics. “Did they not sacrifice something already? There has to be something in that cauldron.”

  “Aye, but a chicken or a newt will not summon a goddess to English shores. It will only secure a flicker of her attention. They need something bigger.”

  “How know you this?”

  “I am a witch-hunter of sorts myself,” I said, “though I confess I did not expect to find any tonight.”

  “You doubted me, m’sieur?”

  “No, I doubted the stories you heard.” But now that I heard the witches were “waiting,” I wondered how long they had been coming out here during the new moon to wait. Those stories of lights and croaking hags looked to be true now.

  “Why not simply bring the necessary sacrifices with them?” Shakespeare asked.

  “It is a matter of power,” I said. “If the sacrifices come to the crossroads willingly, it would be better for their purposes.”

  We heard the neigh of a horse behind us—quite probably one of ours. The witches heard it too. They didn’t stop their chanting or their ritualistic circling of the cauldron, but their masked faces pointed in that direction—in our direction, in fact. I didn’t have to tell Shakespeare that he shouldn’t say another word. We emulated the movement and speech of stone gargoyles in the darkness and kept our eyes on the coven.

  Soon the approach of hooves reached our ears, a soft rumbling thump in the mud, and an angry voice shouted, “That has to be them up ahead, or someone who saw where they went!”

  It sounded like Fire Face to me. Apparently he had recovered from thinking I had slain him and now he wanted a piece of both of us. Chucking Will on the shoulder, I gestured that we should get off the road, and we rolled in the mud until we were naturally (rather than magically) camouflaged in a sodden field of disconsolate cabbages.

  It was Fire Face, all right, riding my horse, and riding double on Will’s were Cheek Boil and Pigeon Liver, a surprise guest. The latter must have returned and offered to make up for his earlier cowardice. And Fire Face’s spleen must have been full of rage to pursue us so blindly and abandon their leader somewhere behind. Fire Face was the de facto leader now and clearly not expecting to find three naked, masked, and dancing witches at a crossroads in Finsbury Fields. The leader had been left behind with his broken collarbones, and were he there to witness what happened next, he would have counted himself fortunate.

  The witches stopped chanting “We wait” and each said in turn, “The time is now,” and then, in concert, “Hecate comes!”

  The bandits reined in short of the fire, and Cheek Boil exclaimed, “What the bloody hell?” shortly before it all became a bloody hell.

  I sat up to yank off my right boot so that the binding tattoo on the sole of my foot could contact the earth and allow me to draw upon its energy. The witches broke their circle and streaked directly at the horses, knives held high and moving much faster than humans should. I would need to speed up just to match them.

  “What are these naked wenches?” Fire Face said, and then one leapt straight over his horse’s head to tackle him backward out of the saddle. Cheek Boil and Pigeon Liver were similarly bowled over, and the horses bolted, not bred or trained for war. The strength of the witches became evident in the next few seconds as they stood each bandit up and employed those knives, drawing them across the men’s throats with an audible slice of flesh. As their life’s blood gouted into the mud, the men tried in vain to stanch the flow with their hands, but the witches dragged them to the crossroads in front of the cauldron, then pushed them into a triangle formed by their shoulder blades, each of them facing a different direction.

  “Come to us, Hecate, Queen of the Moon!” they cried. “Your vessels await!”

  “Oh, no,” I said, and rose to my feet, drawing Fragarach. They really were going to summon her.

  Shakespeare would have joined me, no doubt, but was trying to vomit quietly on the cabbage instead. His earlier drinking had soured his stomach, and seeing a murder so starkly committed brought a good measure of it back up.

  I couldn’t reach the witches in time to stop the summoning and I had Shakespeare to worry about, so I had to watch. We’d be leaving as soon as he finished emptying his guts. The bandits began to twitch, then shudder, then buck violently against the witches’ staying hands on their sternums; their eyes rolled up in their heads and their tongues lolled out of their mouths while blood continued to squirt from their carotids. And then it all stopped for a second, the air charged, and the hairs on the back of my neck started like the quills of the fretful porpentine, for Hecate slipped out of whatever netherworld plane she’d been occupying and into the bodies of those three bandits, simultaneously her sacrifices and her new vessels. Their lives were forfeit, their spirits expelled who knows where, and Triple Hecate had new flesh to command far from Thrace.

  Except she didn’t much like the look or feel of that flesh—it was male, for one thing. So she set about changing it to suit her, and that was when Shakespeare looked up from his retching to see what else could horrify him.

  The witches stepped back from the bodies, since Hecate was occupying them now and they stood on their own power. But the skin of the men’s faces spl
it and melted as it changed shape, and muted popping noises indicated that their very bones were being broken and re-formed to suit the will of the goddess. The bard did me an enormous favor at that point and fainted into the cabbage patch after a single squeak of abject terror. It meant I wouldn’t have to pretend to be a French nobleman anymore or hide my abilities.

  His squeak, however, did catch the attention of one of the witches, and she was just able to spy me and hiss a challenge into the night. “Who is there?” she said in accented English.

  The other two swiveled their heads at that, and the one who had killed Cheek Boil said in Greek, “I will look. Hecate must not be disturbed in transition.”

  She darted in my direction, bloody knife out, as I was thinking that perhaps Hecate should be disturbed in transition. Any aspect of the goddess summoned in this manner would fail spectacularly on measurements of benevolence and goodwill. Deities that manifest through animal and human sacrifice tend not to engage in acts of philanthropy.

  The witch located me and rushed forward, no doubt assuming that I was as slow as the bandits had been. But I was not only as fast as she but better armed and better trained. Her unguarded lunge, meant to dispatch me quickly, got her an arm lopped off at the wrist and a face-first trip into the mud. Her mask crunched and she howled, cradling her shortened arm with her good one. She was far too close to Shakespeare for my comfort, though she hadn’t seen him yet. The wisest thing for my own safety would be to cast camouflage and disappear, but they might find and slay William while searching for me, so I kept myself visible and moved purposely away from him to the other side of the road, which looked like a turnip field. The witches all tracked me, and the one I’d wounded pointed with her good hand.

  “He’s not human!” she shouted in Greek. “He moves like us!”

  “I’m a Druid of Gaia,” I announced in the same language. If Shakespeare revived and heard any of this, my cover wouldn’t be blown. “I mean you no harm if you mean no harm to the earth.”

  “No harm!” the wounded witch shrieked. “You cut off my hand!”

  “You were trying to kill me with it,” I pointed out. “And I chose to maim when I could have killed. Considering what you’ve just done to those men, I think I have the moral high ground.” The hot waxen features of the former bandits were slowing, congealing, solidifying into female faces, and their hair was growing long and dark at an alarming rate; their frames shrank somewhat in their clothing as they transformed into feminine figures. “Isn’t talking more pleasant? Let’s chat. Why are you summoning Hecate here?”

  “The Druids died out long ago,” one near the fire said, ignoring my question.

  “It’s funny you say that, because I was going to say there were no Thracian witches in England.”

  With a final crescendo of chunky bone noises and a slurp of sucking flesh, Hecate finished transforming the bodies of her vessels into her preferred manifestation, and three women who could have stepped off a Grecian urn—long noses, thin lips, flawless skin, and all kinds of kohl on the eyelids—took deep breaths and exhaled as one. They weren’t of differing ages in the mold of maiden-mother-crone: They could be teenaged triplets, which made sense since it was really a single goddess in there, and I regret now that I never asked her if she took pleasure in confounding storytellers with the problem of whether to use singular or plural pronouns. I’ll stick with plural for the moment, because after the synchronized sigh that the witches and I all simply watched in awe, their eyes fluttered open and they spoke in creepy unison: “Blood.”

  That was a pretty dire omen, but it got worse. Triple Hecate’s heads swung to look directly at me and smiled. “His will do. Bring me his heart.”

  Her hands shot in my direction and she spat, “Pétra ostá!” which means “stone bones.” She wanted me to stand petrified while her witches carved me up, but her hex ran into my cold iron aura and fizzled, resulting in nothing more than a thump of my amulet against my chest. I played along with it, though, freezing up, widening my eyes, and warbling in panic as the two healthy witches raced forward to do Hecate’s bidding. Had they been the least bit cautious—a lesson they should have learned after the experience their sister had in coming after me—I might not have been able to handle two at once. But they came in unguarded, unable to fathom the idea that their goddess’s powers might have a counter or a limit.

  Still, I didn’t kill them. They were too undisciplined to be a true threat, but since I couldn’t have them ganging up on me either, they each got a slash across the belly to make them sit down and work on healing for a while. If they were half decent at witchcraft—their accomplishments suggested they were—they’d eventually be fine, but it would take them some time. And then the easy part was over.

  Triple Hecate, unlike her witches, was very disciplined and knew how to coordinate the attacks of her vessels. And she was able to juice up those bodies even more than I was, though I didn’t know at first what fuel she was using for it; if it was blood, then she would need more soon, and Shakespeare was still available. Hissing, she launched herself at me and spread out, two of her vessels flanking me and dodging my first wide swing. She lunged forward in coordinated strikes and danced out of the way of my blade; I got a kick in the kidney, a hammer blow to the ribs that cracked one, and a breath-stealing punt to the diaphragm before I remembered to trigger my camouflage. She had a more difficult time targeting me after that and couldn’t track the sword but still got her licks in, because I fell down and she heard it, aiming her kicks low. I was able to get in a few of mine, though. Fragarach was able to cut her a few times—never deeply, but she slowed noticeably after each one. She really did need that blood to fuel her speed and strength; she wasn’t feeding on the life energy of the earth but rather on the energy of sacrifices.

  The dismembered witch, whom I’d forgotten about, cried out in discovery. “Queen Hecate! There’s a man asleep over here! His blood will set you right!”

  Triple Hecate backed off and turned away, and I looked as well to see the witch pointing with her good hand toward Shakespeare. There was no way I’d be able to get up and run over there faster than Hecate.

  I swung quick and hard with everything I had at the legs of the nearest vessel, taking off a foot and chunking into the other leg, but the other two dashed off to feed on the bard. While my target fell over and I rose to my knees, gasping for breath, the other two called for a knife to cut Shakespeare’s throat.

  “I lost mine in the mud,” the witch wailed, her voice making it plain that she feared Hecate’s displeasure.

  “Check your belts,” one of the other witches moaned, reminding Hecate that her vessels had been wearing clothes and, yes, weapons. As one, the vessels—including mine—looked down, spied their daggers, and drew them. The mobile vessels were closing on Shakespeare and would end him in seconds. There was no time for subtlety, only a desperate chance at saving him. Scrambling on my hands and knees to the fallen vessel, I thrust upward into her skull from the bottom of her jaw just underneath the chin, shoving through into the brain and scrambling any chance of healing that particular mortal coil. She’d heard my approach, though, and at the same time stabbed into my vulnerable left side with her newfound dagger, sinking it below my armpit into a lung. I collapsed on top of her as she expired, and I heard a cry in stereo: The other two vessels stopped, shook as if gripped by a seizure, and then exploded in a shower of chunky meat and bone.

  It had worked—though on a significantly more gory level than I expected: Triple Hecate could not occupy only two vessels. Kill one and you killed them all.

  Or you hit the reset button anyway. I was under no illusion that Hecate had really been slain; she’d merely been banished to whatever Olympian ether she’d come from, and she could be summoned again, though I imagined it would be difficult.

  A hush born of shock settled about the field for a few seconds, and then the weird sisters shrieked—and not over their various wounds. They’d toiled and waited a lon
g time for their moment, for whatever reason, and most likely thought Hecate invincible. To see all of that crushed in the space of minutes caused them more than a little emotional distress.

  Wincing, I yanked out the knife in my side and triggered my healing charm, drawing plenty of power through the earth to fuel it. It would take a while to heal, but I felt sure I’d survive; I still had doubts about Shakespeare. The first witch was standing over him and might kill him out of spite. Lurching to my feet was impossible to do quietly, and the witches all turned at the sound. They couldn’t make me out but knew I was there.

  “We will curse you for this, Druid,” one of them promised. She was clutching her guts together in the mud.

  “You can try, but it would be a waste of your time,” I said. “If Hecate’s curse didn’t work on me, why would yours?”

  They didn’t have a ready answer for that, so they took turns suggesting various sex acts I could perform with animals, and I let them. The longer their attention was focused on me, the closer I staggered to Shakespeare. I goaded them a couple of times to keep them going, and then, when I was close enough, I poked the first witch with the tip of Fragarach, just a nick, which caused her to yelp and leap away from him. She cradled her stump, which I noticed she had managed to stop bleeding. I stepped forward, placing myself between her and the bard’s prone form, and dropped my camouflage.

  “Hi. Back away, join your sisters, and you can live. You might even summon Hecate again someday. Or I can kill you now. What’ll it be?”

  She said nothing but retreated, always keeping her eyes on me, and I watched her go, keeping my guard up.

  With a little bit of help from the elemental communicating through the earth, I located the horses—they hadn’t run far—and convinced them that they’d be safe if they returned to give us a ride back to town; when we got to the stables they’d get oats and apples.