Castle for Rent

by John Dechancie

  The voice belonged to a thin young man in dark slacks and white open-collared shirt who had entered the living room by way of a door to the basement. He approached the group warily.

  “How did you — ?” Then he saw the woman. He bowed. “Your Royal Highness.”

  “Anselm, show these people out. You know what to do.”

  “Of course, ma’am.” Anselm showed a trace of a smile.

  “I sort of figured that,” Gene said, drawing his sword. Then his face fell, as if he suddenly realized something.

  “Your sword will avail you nothing,” Her Royal Highness said. “You are in the grip of forces beyond your understanding. Cooperate, or it will go badly for you.”

  “If you think I’m worried about this little pinhead,” Gene said, jabbing toward Anselm, “think again.”

  Anselm’s hand was a blur. It seemed to grow a wicked-looking automatic pistol. He pointed it at Gene. “You’re the one who should go back to square one, friend.” He grinned wickedly.

  “You do have a point, Anselm old bean,” Gene said, sheathing his sword.

  “Very good, Anselm,” the woman said. “How goes it?”

  “All quiet, ma’am.”

  “Splendid. No sign of my brother?”

  “None at all. May I ask how your battle fares?”

  “Certainly. Deems and his men are holding their own in the outer quarters. Which is to say they are being slaughtered. But my spells sustain them. Even an armless corpse can be animated enough to block a demon’s path. In the unlikely event my brother should discover the location of this portal, you will do your best to take him alive. Is that understood?”

  “It will be done, ma’am.”

  “Good. I will put up the veil again.”

  The woman waved her hand and the portal became a dark oblong.

  Anselm gestured with the gun. “Okay, down those stairs, all of you. But first get rid of all that steel. Throw them in a pile … there.”

  Snowy, Gene, and Kwip tossed their swords and daggers on the floor near a red leather easy chair.

  “Right. Now, down the steps, single file. And I’ll shoot the first one who thinks about … ”

  Outside, the night erupted in fireworks.

  Gene yelled, “Rush ’em, Snowy!”

  But Snowy had already begun his leap. Anselm squawked, stepped back, and fired. Snowy hit him first, then Gene jumped on top. The three of them rolled around the carpet until Kwip jumped on the pile. The tangle of arms and legs became a beast that shambled about the living room, upsetting end tables here and there.

  “Jesus Christ!” Gene yelled finally, springing to his feet. Everyone unpiled, got up, and stepped back warily.

  Anselm rose to his feet. Something strange was happening to him. Parts of his skin had cracked like an ill-fitting rubber suit. The cracks revealed an interior yellow-orange glow. The fissures veined out and widened, and the skin fell away in swatches, revealing the demon body within. The demon swelled to full volume as it shed its outer camouflage. The last of the skin and clothing dropped off as the eerily glowing creature topped seven and a half feet.

  “YOU WILL DIE, HUMAN SCUM! ALL OF YOU!”

  The house lights went out.

  Estate

  “What kind of deal did you have in mind?” Incarnadine asked the enormous apparition that had appeared above the house.

  “I’m sure we can work something out, Inky old friend.”

  “I don’t share your optimism. What do you have to offer, aside from what already belongs to me?”

  “Well, we’re not exactly offering anything, my dear Inky. In fact —”

  “I am not your ‘dear Inky’! I am Incarnadine, Liege Lord, Imperator and Gatekeeper of the Western Pale, and, by the grace of the gods, King and Sovereign Ruler of Ylium, Zephorea, Halmudia, Grekoran, and West Thurlangia! You have our leave to address us as ‘Your Serene and Transcendent Majesty.’”

  The face raised its eyebrows. “Touchy, aren’t we? As I was saying … Your Majesty … you’re not exactly in the best bargaining position imaginable. Now are you?”

  “Why not?”

  “We have the castle. In a very short time we will cut off the only access you have to it.”

  “Which means that you haven’t overrun Ferne’s position yet.”

  “A formality. What are mortals against us? Chopped liver, that’s what.”

  “Well, what’s taking you so long?”

  “I have to admit your sister’s not chopped liver. And neither are you, Ink — er, Your Majesty. Neither are you. Really, I mean it! Look, let’s be frank. All cards face-up. I mean, obviously we have a stalemate here. I think it’s high time we all sat down and had a serious talk about what we’re going to do about the situation. Share ideas. Exchange information. Get to know each other.”

  Incarnadine nodded. “Sounds very cozy. I will also be frank. I’d sooner bed down with scorpions than sit at a bargaining table with the likes of you.”

  The face looked hurt. “Really, that’s not very nice.”

  “You know that the moment I get back inside the castle, your game is through.”

  “I don’t know that at all. You might not be aware of this, but the barrier your great-great-great-great —”

  “You’ve actually kept track?”

  “— great-great-great grandfather erected to keep us out of the castle is gone, Your Super-Terrific Majesty. Zip-bang, not there anymore. Okay? So, don’t go making threats you can’t follow through with.”

  Incarnadine was silent a moment, then said, “I really must compliment you on having mastered the local vernacular so quickly.”

  The face couldn’t help being pleased. “That? It’s nothing. This is one world we’re going to insist on keeping. We work right into the mythology so well, it’s as though it had been created with us in mind.”

  “If you look back far enough into your historical records, you might find that you did have a hand in working up the indigenous mythology, or at least inspiring it.”

  “Really? That’s very interesting. But back to business. Isn’t it clear that you will have to share power at some point? You people can’t keep us back forever.”

  “I don’t see why not,” Incarnadine said. “In any event, I certainly won’t be the one to give away the family business.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t be giving away all of it, now would you?”

  “You would never be content with partial control, were I willing to grant it.”

  “Come now. I think it’s about time you realized that your attitude toward us is really the result of years of propaganda. We get the worst press imaginable. Your family always had it in for us. It’s not fair! We’ve done nothing, absolutely nothing to justify being treated so shabbily all these years. Discrimination! That’s what it is, pure and simple.”

  “You have my sympathies. My advice to you is this — pull back your forces now. If you fail to do so, you will be destroyed.”

  The head shook sadly. “Really, Inky. I thought better of you.”

  Incarnadine raised both hands and began to trace a pattern in the air. “Foul spirit, destroyer of worlds, blasphemer and ancient enemy! I bid you begone, in the name of all the gods of all the universes — get thee hence! Flee the wrath of the righteous, and trouble the innocent no more! Depart, I say!”

  The face contorted with pain. The mouth opened, and a wailing cry pierced the night.

  “Bastard human!” it screamed. “Filthy pile of excrement! You had your chance! Now you’ll suffer everlasting torment! You’ll all suffer horribly and die! You, your family, and all the get of the Haplodie! Die, you’ll all die, die, die —”

  Abruptly the apparition disappeared.

  Trent said, “They really do fear you.”

  “Of course,” Incarnadine said as he finished up the spell. “Their only hope was to take me out — here, in this world, where I was handicapped.”

  “Will it be necessary to push the castle through another m
agical transformation in order to get rid of them?”

  “No, not with all the modifications I made when I recast the transmogrification spell. I can now draw all the power I want without the risk of blowing the spell by overloading it. Which was always a limitation, as you know. I installed a circuit breaker, so to speak.”

  “Nice touch,” Trent said. “But we have to get you back inside the castle before you can tap any of that power.”

  “Not necessarily. Not if what I’ve been working on for the last few days proves fruitful.”

  “What’s that? I thought you were trying to summon the portal.”

  “I gave up on that fairly quick. It was obvious someone had it nailed down. No, I came up with a gimmick that might allow me to tap castle power by means of an inductance effect through interuniversal space. I say might, because it hasn’t worked so far. But now the portal is close at hand, and that might make a difference. I’m going to try it, anyway. I’ll disconnect from your system first. Cover me.”

  “Go ahead,” Trent said. “And good luck.”

  As Incarnadine made movements with his hands, things sprang into existence in the hayfield and in the general vicinity of the manor house. Swirling pillars of fire blazed up. Hordes of sword-wielding monsters charged. Various airborne improbabilities commenced their unlikely maneuvers. The sky opened up and began to rain fire and brimstone, and fingers of lightning jabbed at the earth.

  “They’re really slinging the crap now,” Trent said edgily. “Everything they have, it looks like. This isn’t going to be easy, Inky, castle power or no.”

  “Piece of cake, Trent old fellow,” the King of West Thurlangia said as multicolored pyrotechnics spewed from his fingertips.

  * * * *

  Hand in hand with Deena, Barnaby stumbled up the stairs. Darkness above. He reached a landing, turned, and kept climbing. He didn’t like this option, but the demon had come from the basement, and he didn’t relish going down there. He and Deena had to hide out somewhere, and the ground floor was out, having erupted into a melee soon after the lights had gone out.

  They reached the top of the stairs and a long hallway, along which a few doors were set. Barnaby tried the first and found it locked, as was the second, but the third, which lay at the end of an L, opened onto a dark, sparsely furnished bedroom. They went in and closed the door.

  “I’m hidin’ in here,” Deena said, sliding back the closet door. It was a walk-in closet, quite spacious enough to be considered a small room. Barnaby rolled the door shut, and they stood in darkness with their arms around each other.

  “I don’t know if I like this,” Deena said.

  Horrible noises came from the first floor: shouts, exclamations, the sounds of furniture smashing, and the odd demoniacal howl.

  Barnaby eased the closet door open and looked out. The rectangle of the bedroom window flashed incessantly as the battle raged outside.

  “Still shootin’ out there?” Deena whispered.

  “I don’t think it’s shooting, exactly,” Barnaby said. “I don’t really know what the hell it is. We couldn’t be on Earth, because nothing like this goes on there.”

  “How do you know?”

  Another voice in the closet said, “Can’t you people see I’m busy in here? Damn inconsiderate!”

  Deena tried to climb Barnaby like a ladder. Barnaby toppled backward into a tangle of clothes and coat hangers.

  A match was lit and put to a candle. The form of a squatting demon became visible in the far end of the closet. Beneath its haunches the carpet had been rolled back, and a pentagram, executed in precise chalk lines, was inscribed on the oak flooring underneath.

  It was a different sort of demon from the one they had seen before. Smaller, and having a somewhat rounder head, its coloring was a ghastly, cadaverous gray. Purple wormlike growths festooned the right side of its face, and festering sores afflicted its hide at various locations.

  Its humanlike face registered extreme pique. “You think this is easy with all these distractions?” it demanded to know. “You try to cast an effective spell with all this commotion going on. And then if something screws up, it’s your ass is on the grill. Try working under those conditions! And you just come waltzing in here without so much as knocking! Unbelievable!”

  “Sorry!” Barnaby said after spitting out one end of a feather boa. He tried to get to his feet.

  “Barnaby!” Deena screamed, pounding on his back. “Let’s get outta here!”

  “Capital idea!” the demon agreed.

  It took some doing. The sliding door was stuck, caught on some debris. Finally Barnaby succeeded in rolling it back, and he and Deena crashed through into the bedroom along with a shower of hangers, peignoirs, shoe boxes, and other paraphernalia.

  “I’m complaining to my union about this,” came a muttering from the closet. “Just you wait and see!”

  * * * *

  Downstairs, Sheila huddled behind a sofa, calmly shifting lines of force with the power of her will. There were lines that ran crosswise — north-south (magnetic fields?) — and lines that ran perpendicular, east-west, and she had no idea what those were. All she knew, in this early stage of her understanding of Earth’s magical forces, was that allocating power was a matter of shifting those lines around. Of course, what she really didn’t understand was the power source that seemed very near. She couldn’t fathom why there would be such a strong one so close by. She knew now that certain points of the Earth’s surface, certain features of the landscape, contained great power, and she sensed quite a few of those out there, somewhere, but this nearby power source was different. Anyway, she was tapping it, too. Probably badly, very inefficiently, but she was getting power from it.

  She seemed to be able to see what was happening in the living room, even though she had her eyes closed. Snowy and Gene were each battling a demon, the second demon having appeared shortly after the first one had revealed itself. Snowy and Gene were doing fairly well. They would be dead in an instant if Sheila were to stop helping them, feeding them the magical energy that transformed them into superhuman (in Gene’s case; super-whatever in Snowy’s) swordfighters.

  Whoops! Another demon. Better do a Linda and split off … Snowy. Yeah, split off Snowy into twins. Wait. Was that demon another demon, or a doppelganger? If it was, it was a good one, so no matter.

  By the way, where was Linda? Still hiding behind the settee; good. She was out of this, no magic at all. What about the others? The one with the beard was fighting. The small guy, the librarian, was — in the library! That guy really liked books! But there were others. A guy and a black girl? Sheila couldn’t get a fix on them.

  A fourth demon? Good Lord. Well, now she’d have to split Gene off, too.

  * * * *

  They approached the house, firing continuously at unnamed and unnameable things which attacked from every quarter. A troublesome phenomenon was developing off to the left: thin, glowing tentacles like animated garden hoses snaking through the grass, trying for encirclement. Incarnadine tried bearing to the right, but two filaments met in front of him and completed the circle. Sheets of flame rose to form a dome of fire around the brothers. Incarnadine halted. He shouted a six-syllable word twice, the first time in a normal pitch, the second in falsetto. The dome broke apart, boiling away into pink smoke.

  “Nice work!” Trent called. “Hey, I think it’s going to be all ri —”

  Trent leaped over the rapidly widening crack in the earth that had opened at his feet. Smoke and fire issued from deep within the chasm. The crack branched off and clove the earth near Incarnadine, who leaped to the right, then did a hop, skip, and jump over a series of smaller lateral fissures that gaped in front of him.

  Then the earth settled down, and the brothers continued their advance.

  Streamers of scintillation had begun forming in the air around the house. They did not look particularly dangerous to Incarnadine, and he decided they were probably by-products rather than defensive ph
enomena, but he kept glancing at them occasionally as he walked and fired, mindful that they could develop into something.

  As he swung his sword again and again. Gene wondered why his castle-bred skills were still with him, here, on Earth. He was thankful that they were. He would have been reduced to cold cuts otherwise.

  Gene parried a wicked crosswise cut, sparks shooting off his blade. He riposted with a lunge, then feinted to the demon’s right side. He whirled, did a backflip, landed on his haunches, and slashed at the demon’s legs, cutting them neatly in two at the knee joints. The body toppled over an upturned chair.

  Gene lurched to his feet in time to beat off a lunge by another demon. He backtracked, steadied his footing, then parried three quick cuts, riposting to his opponent’s head. He feinted to the thorax, then quickly jabbed at the eyes again. The demon backed off.

  Snowy’s sword was like the blade of a whirling fan. He was up against two opponents and holding his own.

  He was thinking of how hungry he was.

  “Somethin’s happening out there!” Deena said, peeking out the dormer window.

  They had found a relatively demon-free spare bedroom. Barnaby rose and looked out the window. It was hard to describe what was going on. There were two arenas of special interest: one, what was happening out in the field in back of the house; two, what was gathering around the house itself. The latter involved sparkling auroral displays that fluttered like sheets hung out to dry in a high wind. As he and Deena watched, the phenomenon grew more intense, partially blocking their view of the strange battle that raged in the backyard.

  Barnaby sank to the bed. “I can’t watch anymore. Is the door locked?”

  “Yeah. No, let me check it.”

  Deena returned. “Yeah, it’s locked. I — what the hell are you doin’?”

  “I’m tired,” Barnaby said as he turned down the bedding. “I’m going to try to get some shut-eye.”

  “You gonna what? You’re crazy!”

  Barnaby crawled between the covers. “What else is there to do? We can’t get out of here. We might as well die in bed as anywhere else. Besides, if I’m dreaming all this, maybe I’ll wake up.”