Dragon Noir (Pixie for Hire Book 3)

by Cedar Sanderson

  Attack of the Things

  I had expected Alger to take us somewhere else. Gates between Above and Underhill are location specific, after all. Some were easier to use than others, with less space between them. Or at least I presumed it was space that meant some transits took longer, and more effort, than others. I wasn’t a physicist, and I doubted that one of those would even know. Underhill wasn’t exactly open to having that sort of scientific scrutiny, yet.

  I didn’t know if we ever would be able to accept that. The society here was old, rigid, and it worked. Letting some human tramp all over it might be a bad thing. I wasn’t going to worry about that just now, though. I watched Alger as he closed his eyes and moved his hands into a position like he was holding an invisible beach ball. I had shut away my earlier anger at him. I’d let it out later, when it wouldn’t compromise the mission. Bella stood beside him, eyes also closed. I surmised that she was using her Sight to keep an eye on what he was doing, so she could help at need. Byrne and I stood behind them, the sprites quietly hovering around his head and shoulders.

  They had been warned about the need for stealth, and I knew their silent language of hand gestures well from previous missions with them. Now, I flickered another caution, to watch Byrne. We’d told him a lot, but I still wasn’t ready to trust him fully. He could say he didn’t know how to use a weapon, that didn’t make him harmless.

  I would take my cue from Alger, and the sprites would take theirs from me. I tensed as Alger’s invisible ball began to shimmer, and he spun it hard away from him. Like a whirlpool, it opened up into a vortex of… nothingness. I could see the garden through the shimmer, but in the center, my eyes slid away from the twisting motion, with a sickening lurch of my stomach. Alger, staff in hand, stepped toward it, and then walked into it, fading out slowly with each step. Bella opened her eyes.

  “Go. I will come last, to keep it open for all of us. Hurry, this bugger is taking…” I didn’t hear the rest of it, I had already poked Forrest Byrne through ahead of me. He didn’t seem to be afraid, which was a relief, I didn’t want to carry him.

  I wasn’t sure what I had expected. Passing through a gate between the other planes was attenuating, a sort of stretched-out vertigo that was accompanied by some visual effects, often sparkles, and a flavor, or smell, that seemed to vary for each person talking about it. This was much more intense.

  Had I thought that leaving Bella behind would have worked, I would have happily done so. I felt like I was being turned inside out, even as I took step after plodding step. What this was doing to our unborn children, who had no context nor awareness, I wasn’t happy thinking about. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and put my own up to clasp hers, briefly. I couldn’t walk out the other side without both hands ready, but it was good to have that contact. Whatever lay ahead, we were together on this one. At least nothing could follow us.

  The other side was confusing. It was like a foggy day, but lit up, as though a rising sun were hitting the water droplets in the air. The cumulative effect was a golden suffused glow. I could see Byrne, but not Alger. Bella walked to my side, and we all stood still for a minute. There was a far off sound like water dripping. Slowly, I could see shadows and shapes resolve in the mist. One of them was Alger, his floppy hat already wet, and an irritated look on his face.

  “Don’t just stand there.” He snapped. “Follow me.”

  “How far is it?” I asked, gesturing for Byrne and Bella to precede me. I wanted to make sure nothing was following us.

  “I got us fairly close. Only a few minutes out in…” He waved an arm at the mist vaguely. "This mess.”

  I thought we were walking through an open parkland of sorts. The heavy mist stayed the same glowing lightness, but tree-shaped shadows loomed as we neared them, then faded out again. I became aware of a high-pitched buzzing noise coming from somewhere past my right shoulder. I gestured at Ewan, and he nodded, then banked silently off into the mist. I wondered how he could navigate in that stuff. I’d never asked sprites if they used sonar or radar. They wouldn’t know what I was talking about.

  He reappeared and landed on my shoulder, talking into my ear with low tones. A whisper will carry further than a conversational murmur. “Sommat like a bee-hive, only bigger."

  “Let’s not disturb it, then. Thanks.”

  He returned to his place in the formation, and we kept walking. The hum died away behind us after a few minutes of walking. Alger held up one hand, and stopped, the rest of us gathering around him. I could see it once I was abreast of his position. A wall loomed in front of us, the same color as the mist, it looked like.

  “Here it is.” He kept his voice low.

  “This is the library?” Byrne spoke for the first time since we had crossed over. I could see his head swivel back and forth, then upward. All we could see was wall, stretching into mist. The ground we walked on was short, evenly cut… I knelt and pulled a few blades. No, this grass grew this high. Interesting.

  “That wasn’t so bad.” Byrne sounded pleased. “How do we get in?”

  “We find the gates. There’s only one way in. And be quiet, because things use this wall as shelter.”

  I made another mental note to have a long, firm talk with Alger about endangering others when we returned to Underhill. It was one thing with me, either as a monster hunter or the boy apprentice. It was altogether unacceptable with my pregnant wife and children.

  “Which way?” Was all I said. I was going to resist the shouting for now.

  “It’s round. We’ll get to it eventually.” He started forward, walking along the wall.

  I gritted my teeth and fell back to the end of the line again. He didn’t know where we were, not really. And now I was seeing shadowy movement out of the corner of my eye, as though something were walking parallel to the wall with us. I checked my holster to make sure my pistol was loose and ready. I wasn’t going to count on this spooky place staying quiet.

  I was ready, then, when they came out of the mist. I saw immediately what Alger meant when he called them things. They were almost formless, it was like being attacked by a stampeding herd of protoplasm. One had long cilia, which struck the ground with enough force to sound like a herd of galloping horses. I put my back to the wall and pulled a shotgun from the nospace where I’d stored it. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bella doing the same. Alger was far enough I couldn’t see him clearly, although I knew it would involve his staff and fireballs of magic. Byrne was just trying to make himself one with the seamless wall, while the sprites hovered in front of him.

  I fired first. Once an attacker gets within a certain range, you can’t stop him even if he’s dead. Dead doesn’t always know it’s dead, that catches up later when the body starts talking to the brain again. During a charge, everything is on autopilot, and these things were charging. They were also big. Elephant sized, even if they didn’t have legs.

  My shotgun blast whipped one around, and I could see a gout of clear liquid squirt out. It writhed on the short grass, and I turned my attention to the other two. There were only three? Maybe. I couldn’t see any others, but the mist was heavy.

  Bella and I fired at the same time, and the second one folded in on itself and sort of slid toward us. The third one hesitated, like maybe it was talking to whatever it had for a brain. Then it came to a stop, and poked its fallen buddy with a pseudopod. I held my fire. Maybe they would realize we weren’t easy food, and would go away. The first one I had shot weaved back into an upright position. Liquid still gushed out of it.

  The eerie thing was that there was no noise. Maybe they didn’t have lungs or mouths, but other than the thudding while they ran at us, nothing. The mist swallowed up any sound, although I could hear Byrne panting in fear next to me.

  “Run,” hissed Alger.

  “What?” I really didn’t want to put my back – or side, since we couldn’t retreat – to these big baddies.

  “Run! More will be on their way. They may stop to fin
ish these, if we hurry.” He was already starting to edge along the wall, into the mist. I could see what he meant. Something was moving out there, and the three in the first wave seemed to have stopped. The mist would cover us.

  Bella nodded at me and clipped her weapon to a combat sling so she could shoot from the hip if needed. I gripped Byrne’s upper arm and all but hauled him along with me. We weren’t fully running, just hustling with intent. Once I got the older man started, I let go, and kept scanning behind us as we got far enough from the beasts to lose sight of them. I could feel the ground shaking as something showed up to feed back there.

  One thing for sure, we’d picked a direction and couldn’t change our minds. I kept moving at a steady lope, wondering how long Bella and Byrne could keep this up. Alger was tougher than Cape Buffalo hide, I wasn’t worried about him.

  Alger held up a hand and stopped so abruptly that Bella almost ran into him. Byrne did bump into her, and I found myself growling wordlessly at him under my breath.

  “What is it now?”

  I kept my back to the wall, and edged closer. It looked like a ramshackle hut, leaning up against the wall. Like someone had used the big wall rather than build a fourth one of their own. There was a fence between us and the shack, a woven willow wattle. I recognized it as an old Briton design. The end of the fence was… glued, sort of, to the smooth wall with gobs of glowing magic. I closed one eye.

  The whole thing, fence, house, all of it, was closed in a glowing purple dome that started at the wall and extended out further than I could see with regular eyesight. Someone had strong wards. I was looking at this when a loud sound nearby sounded.

  “Maa!” and I opened both eyes to look down. A small goat with bright golden eyes looked at me from across the fence. There was another one standing a few paces behind it, eying us suspiciously. Bella held out her hand to it.

  “Bella!” I saw her push right through the warding as though it weren’t even there, and the goat nibbled at her fingers, making her smile.

  That was very odd. I held out my hand, and then jerked it back. Ever grabbed an electric fence? That’s pretty much what this felt like.

  “Alger?” I asked him. He’d moved away from the wall, and had one eye closed so he could stay away from the shielding. “What is this?”

  “I have no idea.” He looked back at Bella, who was caressing the goat. “Warded, but keyed to her?”

  “Shocked me.” I told him. Byrne was looking wild-eyed, and I guessed that meant he’d felt it, too. The sprites were watching our backtrail so we didn’t get caught unawares here. Good men.

  “We could go around.” Alger closed an eye again. “It doesn’t go out too much further. Only about an acre under the dome.”

  “I see a garden, and dwarf trees?” I made sure I wasn’t too close to the ward. “I thought you said no-one lived here.”

  “I’m the only one that knows about it,” he protested.

  I pointed. “Then who is that?”

  Lavendar

  The figure that was walking quickly toward us was distinctly humanoid, and as she grew more clear, obviously female. A long coat flapped around her legs, making her look like she was wearing skirts, but she was dressed very practically for someone who kept a little farm out in the middle of a howling wilderness.

  Bella cried out, and tried to get over the fence as the woman got near. “Grandmother!”

  I looked at her, scrambling over the twigs, and shouted. “Bella! Watch out!”

  I knew what a strong glamour could do. And Bella was the only one of us who could pass through the wards. All my internal alarms were jangling, but Bella, over the fence, was running into the arms of the white-haired fairy. Both of their wings were sparkling brilliantly. I sighed and ran my hands through my hair.

  “Dammit, woman…” I touched the ward again, and danced a little as the pain passed through me. “Bella!” I shouted again.

  She looked toward me over the woman’s shoulder. I could see the smile on her face. They let go of their embrace, but the older woman took Bella’s forearms in hers and was talking to her. They were too far away from us for me to hear her.

  “Bella! Don’t make me break this thing down!”

  Alger grabbed my arm. “Lom, stop. Look…”

  He pointed into the mist, his back to the warded dome. I looked away from the women.

  There were a lot of them. More than I could count, as they kept moving in and out of the mist and changing places. Some looked sort of like real animals, this time, although they mostly had too many legs, and mouths. They weren’t charging, but rather creeping toward us, with the occasional flinch backwards. I had to assume they had tangled with the woman in the dome before, and it had gone badly. But we were not in the dome.

  I looked at Byrne, who was trembling slightly. “Can you use the sight? See the dome?”

  He shook his head.

  “Holy Mother…” I swore. This was not going to work well. “Ewan?”

  “Aye, sar, passin’ well.”

  That was good, at least. “One of you stay on him. Get him worked around the dome, I don’t want any of us trapped in this niche by the big wall.”

  Ewan nodded. I looked at Alger. “Do you think that gate is close?”

  “Doesn’t matter without her.” He didn’t take his eyes off the slowly approaching mob of things. “I don’t think it will let me in.”

  “Is it sentient… nevermind. Not now. We don’t have a lot of choices if Bella doesn’t come out of there.”

  “Do you think that’s her grandmother? I thought she was dead?” Alger started to side-step, keeping his eyes on the monsters.

  “Damned if I know. I thought it was odd, we would have known had protocol been followed, but Lavendar was a rogue to begin with, and Bella’s family is…”

  “Powerful.” Alger offered absently. I had been going to say crazy, but I left it. They were on my side, even if they were odder than anything I’d seen Underhill. Raven was a little god, if he was everything I’d seen and been told. Although he’d thumped me painfully when I expressed that to him.

  I risked a look behind us. Bella was walking toward the shack, still talking to the other woman. What was going on? She wouldn’t leave us if she realized we were in danger. I wondered if she could see outside the dome. Was she telling Lavendar to let us in?

  Alger’s fireball caught my attention and I had to put my wife’s strange behavior out of my mind. One of the things had decided that we looked tasty enough to overcome any conditioning, and Alger had obviously decided that a reminder was in order. Unlike the first things we’d met, these chimeras made noise. The injured one was currently shrieking like the kettle on the boil.

  “Look!” Byrne pointed a trembling finger at the massed creatures. Several of them, ranging in size from elephantine to dog – albeit a big dog – were falling on their injured companion. They really did cannibalize, as Alger had suggested earlier. I grimaced.

  “Put your fingers in your ears.” I told him, slinging the shotgun and pulling another weapon out. Maybe if I fed them enough, it would buy us more time. It wasn’t that the RPG was loud, it was just awfully close to him, and I didn’t need him panicking. The weapon was one that you shoved a warhead into the muzzle, then fired from your shoulder. I didn’t have a lot of reloads. The ragged man I’d taken it from somewhere in a dusty desert Above hadn’t planned on living long enough after his attack on an American squad to need many. I’d taken it before he could use it, and he was right. He hadn’t lived long.

  I braced, and fired. Before I even saw the rocket hit, I was jamming another into the barrel. The backblast had passed right through the dome. I’d assumed it would, otherwise the old lady would need an air supply. Wards were usually set to react to living matter, not inanimate. In theory, I could throw rocks through it to get Bella’s attention. But not now. One thing about this weapon, it was pretty foolproof. Which was why the dusty fools liked it so much, I supposed. I’d seen too mu
ch of that toxic brand of ideology over the centuries to have any respect for it. None of them could shoot worth a damn, anyway.

  I fired again. I was losing track of Alger and Byrne as I went into the fighting fugue state I knew all too well. Oh, sure, they were there. I was able to know precisely where, and how we were moving, step, step, fire… step, step sideways.

  The rockets were beginning to cause dissension in the ranks. I was aiming for the biggest ones, in the idea that a sheer volume of available meat, or whatever the hell these things used for flesh, would be irresistible to the hungry others.

  I got to see the results of one blast. The thing had translucent skin, and the rocket penetrated deep, the percussion of the blast a visible bubble in front of the warhead… and then it blew, showering the ranks with globs of slime and near blinding me with the flash. I stopped looking back, then, just shoot and scoot.

  We had made it around the belly of the dome, and I ran out of rockets. I tossed the weapon into nospace, hoping I’d be able to retrieve it later, but I couldn’t take the time to push it in carefully right now. I swung the shotgun back up and hesitated. Something had changed.

  Alger, during all this, had been steadily firing fireballs into them. His didn’t explode, but they stuck. The only time I saw one of them extinguished was when I blew up the clear one. Byrne was quiet as a mouse, and the sprites were staying out of it. With only three of them, their advantages of massed attack were nullified.

  Now the two of us held fire. The things were no longer pressing their attack. Many were falling on their injured or dead, ravenously tearing them to pieces. The noise had risen to a crescendo. But they weren’t coming at us, and a few were actually backing away. As I held fire, I kept moving, sidling around the dome. The sprites were helping guide us since it wasn’t visible to eyesight.

  Maybe my plan had worked. I risked another look over my shoulder, and felt my heart jump when I saw Bella there, just on the other side of the woven fence. She pointed in the direction we were already going, and then started running in that direction.