The Black Reckoning

by John Stephens

  Where the two camps met was a large green tent. There were torches on either side of the entrance, and several dwarfish guards stood out front. As they approached, the children could hear voices from inside, talking loudly over one another. And then figures began to emerge. Kate and Michael saw Wilamena’s father and Lady Gwendolyn, the silver-haired elf, appear and stalk off—gracefully, of course. They saw Magda von Klappen and Hugo Algernon and Captain Stefano and Master Chu, the Chinese wizard, emerge whispering and hissing to one another, and they saw three or four other dwarves and humans and elves whom they did not recognize all come out and head off to different parts of the camp.

  “I would venture,” Captain Anton said, “that the Council did not go well.”

  A solitary figure stepped out after the others and stood there, his face lit by the flare of the torches. It was King Robbie, and Kate’s first thought was how old and tired and gray-faced he looked. Then he turned and saw the children—there was a moment of shock—and his expression regained, for a moment, some of its former life.

  “Why, bless me….”

  And he was hugging both of them at once, pressing them against the metal studs of his tunic.

  “We had no word of you!” He held them back to look at them, though only for a moment. Then he peered past them into the darkness. “But where’s wee Emma?”

  “That’s what we have to talk to you about,” Kate said. “She’s okay. We think. But—”

  “You can tell me as you eat. And I have much to tell you as well.” He glanced up at the elf. “Thank you, Captain.”

  “I only escorted them from the beach. It was Haraald and his dwarves who got them out of Loris.”

  “And Haraald is back safe?”

  The elf captain shook his head.

  “I see. Thank you all the same.”

  Then he put his arms around the children and guided them into the tent.

  —

  The dwarf king sat them at the end of a table in the middle of his tent around which there were many chairs, most of them looking as if they had been roughly pushed back. It was there, Kate surmised, that the meeting had just taken place.

  The tent itself was simply furnished, with half a dozen candles and lanterns illuminating the interior. There was the council table, which was strewn with various maps and papers and dirty glasses, and there was a smaller, square table on which stood various platters of food and jugs and bottles. King Robbie gathered the children’s dinner: fish, potatoes, olives, a kind of rice. A simple desk and chair faced one canvas wall. A suit of armor and a great ax stood at the back of the tent, as if waiting patiently for their master. There was nowhere to sleep, and Kate wondered if the dwarf king even planned on sleeping or had put that off for some other, more peaceful time.

  “Eat. You both look famished. That’s a danger in wartime. You keep going and going, not realizing how run-down you are, and then, when you need your strength most, you have none.” He nodded at two dwarf servants who were taking away the last of the glasses and plates. “Thank you, lads. You be sure and get some sleep now.” He turned back to the children. “We just had a Council meeting. I’m worried, I don’t mind telling you. I don’t know that any of us ever really appreciated how much Pym did. I don’t mean his magic. I mean him, as a person. Elves, dwarves, humans—historically, there’s a lot a’ mistrust and bad blood. And I’m not saying the dwarves are innocent; we’re as guilty as any of ’em. But Pym helped us forget all that and work together. With him gone, well, I try, but…” He shrugged, and his hands fell open. “Aye, it’s a grave blow, losing Stanislaus Pym, a grave blow.”

  And Kate thought again that he looked very old and tired.

  “But, Your Majesty,” Michael said, “what happened? We only left Loris a couple of days ago. How could it have been captured?”

  Robbie McLaur gave a short, humorless laugh. “Ah, lad, I don’t know that we ever had much of a chance. Those who might be our natural allies—I’m talking humans, dwarves, elves, merfolk, fairies, some gnomes and giants—they’re scattered across a hundred miles a’ sea, and even farther afield, on the other side of the world. Getting them to abandon their homes and send their forces to Loris so we could concentrate our strength and perhaps have some hope of defeating the Dire Magnus? Well, they wouldn’t, would they?

  “So the Dark One took the city with no more trouble than if we’d wrapped it up and given it to him. I take no joy in the fact that I predicted how it would go, but predict it I did. That’s why one a’ the first things I did when Pym put me in charge was to arrange a fallback point if we had to abandon Loris. A hidden place where we could keep a resistance alive. And so far, we’ve done that.

  “But where to go from here, that’s the question.”

  He sighed again and rubbed his face, and Kate stole a glance at Michael, seeing in his expression the same concern and worry she was feeling.

  The dwarf king waved his hand. “Enough a’ that. The last I heard of you two was from Princess Wilamena and Captain Anton. They said that you”—he looked at Kate—“appeared in the Dire Magnus’s fortress and took your brother and sister and Gabriel and vanished. So where the devil, excuse my language, have you been these past days? Where’s your sister? I do hope wherever she is, she’s with Gabriel. Tell me that at least.”

  And so Kate and Michael told him about the Atlas taking them to the land of the giants, how they’d almost been put into a pie, about going to the ancient city that had been taken over by monster spiders, how they had found the remains of the person who’d stolen the Reckoning from Rhakotis long ago and it had turned out to be the Countess—

  “Not the same witch from Cambridge Falls!” King Robbie exclaimed, slapping the table with his fist. “She’s not back, is she?”

  “No,” Kate said. “Well, she was for a second. Michael brought her back with the Chronicle, but then a giant stepped on her.”

  Robbie McLaur chuckled. “Is that so? That would’ve been worth seeing. But did you find out where the Reckoning is hidden?”

  Kate said they had, and she told how they had gone into the cavern below the giant city and found the sleeping spiders, and how it turned out that there was a portal to the world of the dead, and that that was where the Countess had hidden the Reckoning all those years before—

  “You don’t say,” the dwarf king murmured. “Fiendishly clever, I’ll give her that, fiendishly clever.”

  But then, they said, the spiders had woken up—

  “They didn’t!”

  If nothing else, the dwarf king was an excellent audience.

  The children were both speaking, hurrying to get to the end, and they told how only Emma, the Keeper of the Reckoning, was able to go into the world of the dead, and after she had passed through, the portal had closed, and now they didn’t know where she would come out or when or even if.

  “You don’t mean she’s gone there alone?” Robbie McLaur exclaimed. “What about Gabriel?”

  “He went off to look for the Secretary.”

  “Hmm. And you say the portal closed?”

  “Yes. Which is why we have to find the other portals to the world of the dead. We know one’s in Antarctica, in the elfish forest, but there must be more. And then we have to figure out which one Emma will come through.”

  Just saying all this stoked Kate’s panic anew. In the rush of events since leaving the giants’ city—the pain she’d felt when using the Atlas, Michael’s admission that he’d felt the same disturbance when he’d used the Chronicle—she’d allowed herself to forget just how distant Emma was, how great the obstacles were that separated them. But now it was all before her again, and she felt small and weak and hopeless.

  The dwarf king stood, refilled his glass with wine, drank it off, refilled it again, and then returned to the table.

  “Aye, there is one portal in the land of the lad’s Princess Wilamena—”

  “She’s not my Princess Wilamena,” Michael said quickly. “I don’t know wh
y you’d think that—”

  “Michael—” Kate warned.

  “And at least one more, on an island off the coast of Scotland.”

  “That’s it?” Michael said. “Just those two?”

  “Well, now, no,” the King said, looking down at his glass. “There’s one more that I know of.”

  “Still, that’s only three!” Michael said. “We’ll just send a team to each of them, and sooner or later Emma will come through and she’ll have the Reckoning and we’ll use it to kill the Dire Magnus and that will be that!”

  “I’ve no doubt she will have the Reckoning,” Robbie McLaur said. “You are a formidable family, and that little one’s a born fighter.”

  Kate could see there was something the dwarf king didn’t want to tell them.

  She forced herself to ask, “Then what’s the problem?”

  “The problem”—Robbie McLaur looked up, and he seemed to be asking forgiveness even as he said it—“is that the last portal to the world of the dead is in the Garden of the Rose Citadel. Which means if your sister comes through, she’ll be delivering the Reckoning—and herself—smack into the hands of the Dire Magnus.”

  Kate felt as if the dwarf king’s words had turned her to stone; she couldn’t move.

  It must’ve been the same for Michael, for just then there was a squeal, a flash of gold, and the elf princess flew in and threw herself on him, crying, “You’re alive, you’re alive! My beloved Rabbit!” and Michael didn’t even protest.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Ferryman

  At more or less the same time that Kate and Michael were listening to Robbie McLaur tell them about the portal in the Garden of the Rose Citadel, Emma was trying to convince herself to just go down and join the line of stupid ghosts.

  It’s not like they can hurt you, she told herself.

  Or could they? She wasn’t some ghost expert. She didn’t know what ghosts could and couldn’t do. And were they ghosts? They didn’t really look like ghosts. They just looked like people. She could just imagine how if Michael had been there, he would’ve been pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and reeling off some long, boring speech about ghosts and their ghost habits until someone (probably her) flicked him in the head. But he wasn’t here; no one was; she was alone.

  At first, walking away from Kate and Michael and Gabriel through the dark tunnel that led from the spider’s nest, with Michael’s dinky flashlight doing almost nothing to show her where she was going, she’d been full of energy and high purpose. She was going to find the Reckoning, save everyone, and pretty much be the total hero. But after walking for what had felt like hours—but had really been more like twenty minutes—she had begun to consider how little she actually knew about where she was going. How big was the world of the dead? What if the book was thousands of miles away? What if it took her years to find it? Was the world of the dead cold? Should she have brought a sweater? What if it rained? Where would she get food? How would she find her way back out?

  While thinking all this, she’d noticed a grayness in front of her, and she’d passed from the blackness of the tunnel into a thick, wet mist, at the same moment becoming aware that she was walking on dirt instead of rock.

  She’d known then that she had crossed over.

  Soon, the mist had begun to thin, and she’d found herself on a hillside of skeletal trees. She’d let her feet carry her down the slope, the mist still pearling on her clothes and hair, till she had arrived at last at a wide road of packed dirt; and it was there that she’d found the procession of the dead.

  For a second, she’d thought the walkers were transparent, they were so gray and fuzzy, but as she hid behind a tree to watch them pass, she saw that the grayness and fuzziness was just the mist, and the dead—for they had to be dead, didn’t they?—were not see-through at all. Did that mean they were solid? She could hear the soft shuffling of their feet in the dirt, so maybe they were. Only, how was that possible? Hadn’t they left their bodies in the world of the living?

  A memory came back to Emma, of being in school the year before, and reading all these Viking myths—which as far as school readings went had been pretty great, as they’d been mostly about chopping the heads off giants and trolls—and she remembered how Viking heaven was a place where the dead Vikings sat around eating and drinking all the time. It stood to reason they couldn’t very well have done that without bodies. Maybe that meant you got two bodies, one in the world of the living, and another one down here. How exactly that happened, Emma had no idea, but she felt better knowing that there was at least some kind of precedent.

  The figures were all moving in the same direction, at the same steady, hypnotic pace, as if obeying some silent call. They did not speak. There were men and women, old and young, there were children, there were babies being carried. There was no uniformity to the clothes. It was almost as if each person was wearing whatever they’d had on when they died. Did that mean if you had a heart attack while wearing some ratty old bathrobe, you had to wear that till the end of time? Though even that would be better than being naked. Emma made a mental note to be sure to be wearing clothes when she died.

  Emma would’ve just gone around them, only the walkers were going the same direction she was. For her part, she had no choice in the matter. Since that first moment under the spider’s web when she’d stared into the portal, the Reckoning had been pulling her onward.

  So finally, not knowing what else to do, she stepped from behind the tree and, with her chin thrust out and her hands in fists at her sides, she walked firmly and directly down to join the parade of the dead.

  A few of the walkers glanced over; otherwise, her arrival occasioned no reaction.

  Emma made a point of sticking to the edge of the road, but after a few moments, she began to relax and look around her. She had fallen in beside a woman who was wearing a gray business suit. She looked very old, Emma thought, like forty.

  “Hi.”

  The woman turned her head slowly. Her gaze had the fuzziness of a person who’s just woken from a deep sleep.

  “Why’re you all going this way?”

  The woman stared down the road. “I…I don’t know. I just…have to.”

  “Where’re you from?”

  “I’m from…” Again the woman seemed lost. “I don’t know actually. I can’t remember.”

  “Well, how’d you die?” Emma hoped this wasn’t a rude question, but really, the woman was dead; there was no getting around that.

  “I…I don’t remember that either.”

  As they walked on, Emma asked several others where they were from and how they’d died. None could remember. They couldn’t even recall their own names; their memories had been wiped clean. Nor could any of them say what was drawing them down the road. But as the walkers didn’t seem dangerous, she continued on with them. It made her deeply sad that none of the dead could remember their lives. To forget where they’d lived or what jobs they’d had was one thing. But to forget everything about who they’d been—that meant forgetting their families and friends, everyone they’d ever loved. And that was awful. Emma had never been scared of dying. But what was the point of living if she was just going to die and forget about Kate and Michael and Gabriel? If she was going to lose all those memories that made her her?

  Before long, the road curved and came to its end, spilling out onto a wide, rocky beach that gave way to a body of eerily calm, gray-black water. Whether it was a river or a sea or an ocean was impossible to tell, because the same mist that clung to the land also clung to the water. A fleet of small boats—they looked to be little more than rowboats, piloted by figures wearing dark, hooded cloaks—was making its way to the shore, loading up the dead, and then heading back out into the mist.

  There was also a concrete jetty jutting out into the water, but the dark-garbed boatmen were avoiding it, pulling their boats right up onto the rocky shoals of the beach.

  Emma looked out past the beach and t
he boats, willing the mist to clear so that she could see across the water. The book was out there somewhere, calling her onward.

  Go on, she thought. You know you have to.

  The beach was made of rough black rocks, and after the silence of the march, everything felt loud, the scraping and crunch of her footsteps, the slap of the boatmen’s oars, the sound of the keels striking the rocks. There was no shoving or pushing among the dead. They were slowly and calmly climbing into the boats, and then the boatmen would push off from the shore, swing their small crafts around, and vanish back into the mist.

  As if by appointment, Emma walked directly to a boat that had beached itself so its prow rose high out of the water. Had she taken more time, she might’ve noticed that the dead were avoiding that particular boat. Emma felt a strange, inexplicable fear; her heart pounded in her chest, and every part of her wanted to turn back. But back to where? The way was forward. She could feel cold water lapping around her ankles and soaking her shoes. The cowl of the boatman’s hood covered his face.

  “Where do these boats go?” she asked.

  “The world of the dead.”

  “I thought this was the world of the dead.”

  “This is just the road thereto.”

  Emma stopped; there was something about the voice that was strangely, deeply familiar. She stepped forward, grabbed his hood, and ripped it back.

  “I knew it! I knew it was you!”

  She was looking at the face of the old wizard, Stanislaus Pym. Only, he had changed. The ratty tweed suit and mangled tie were gone, as were the broken and patched eyeglasses. He now wore a hooded robe of dark gray. His perpetually messy white hair had been tamed and, somehow, gotten longer. He’d even found time since dying to grow a rather substantial beard. In many ways, he looked more like a wizard than he ever had, though the expression on his face was calm, and oddly vacant.

  “What’re you doing here?!”

  “I’m a ferryman.”

  “Stop that! You’re trying to trick me again.”

  He looked genuinely confused. “Trick you? I ferry the dead—”