by Tom Doyle
Scherie was appalled, but she recognized that she was being played for time. “Go fuck yourself, you piece of shit.” She fell into the stretched tempo of combat and hit Dale with a series of one-two punches, and kicks, trying to make contact for long enough for her dispelling invective to work.
At first, Scherie pulled some of her punches to spare Dale’s body as she strove to free him. But after only a few exchanges of blows, she saw how the ghoul was avoiding Dale’s Native American–derived martial art, with its control of the other person’s movement—that style had a prolonged contact with the opponent’s body just short of judo. Instead, the ghoul’s blows were lightning strikes, with a lot of footwork and ring dancing.
He connected to her face. She responded with a combination punch and kick, but nothing seemed to slow him down. These few blows and their inflicted pain that she was trying damned hard to ignore were enough to prove a point: if this turned into all-out mortal combat, she was screwed. Dale had far more training and experience, and the ghoul seemed to have co-opted much of Dale’s muscle memory. If this style of fight went to the finish, she would have to kill Dale or be killed herself.
Even in accelerated mode, time was running short for all of them. Scherie had one last gambit. She stepped back and dropped out of the preternatural speed of combat. With all the love in her heart, she wiped the blood from her face and held out her arms. “I won’t kill my husband. Do what you will.”
The monster that animated Dale smiled at her with corrupt gentleness, and seemed to savor the windup of his arm for the coup de grâce blow. His fingers twitched with eagerness; he would rip her love-filled heart out. “Less than a woman!” he snarled, and his hand lashed for her chest.
In Allah’s name, what an idiot! Scherie was a trained soldier who never would surrender her weapons for any hostage. She spun into the blow, deflected it, and hit the ghoul’s descending forehead with a craft-enhanced headbutt. “Pass out, Dale.”
Dale’s eyes rolled into his head and his body crumpled to the floor. The arms and legs still twitched with the ghoul’s efforts to animate them, confirming Scherie’s strategy of divide and extirpate. She laid her hands on the side of Dale’s face as if she intended to passionately kiss him. “Motherfucking ghoul rapist, go to hell!”
In a blinding explosion, with all the energy of her earliest naive efforts, she sent the ghoul out of this world. If there’s both a hell and justice, perhaps he is there. She should have saved more juice, but she didn’t want to see that fucker around here no more.
Hands still framing his face, Scherie spoke gently to her husband. “Dale, wake up.”
Dale’s eyes opened, and his hand went up to one of Scherie’s. “Shit, my head. Did I do or say something stupid?”
“Yeah,” said Scherie. “You owe me a fish sandwich.”
“OK,” he said, wobbling to his feet.
“In Istanbul.”
“That bad?” he asked.
“Let’s go save Endicott,” she said. And wait until I get my hands on you, Roderick.
But when she tried the door, Scherie found that she’d forgotten one thing: the door was barred against them.
* * *
Roderick restrained my limbs with a poppet and his craft. Why this poppet gave him power over me, I didn’t know, but I was vulnerable to whatever attack Roderick made next. In a desperate counter, I commanded, “Freeze. In Jesus’s name. Freeze. In Jesus’s name.” He froze, but I had to repeat the command like a mantra to keep him still. We were trapped in a standoff.
Face caught in a time-lapse series of contortions, Roderick strained and invoked against me. I prayed and leaned into my sword, and where our powers met was a star of bright light, heat, and ozone. My power flowed through me, wanting to drive Roderick before it and make him kneel. Roderick’s power seemed to emerge from thin air near the wall and arc into his abdomen like electricity from a hose. Around the edges of this quasar, the energy of the unknowns and Ukrainians still worked like a hollow-pointed conical drill to hold and widen the hemorrhaging wound between the worlds. From my angle, faces of the dead soldiers and peasants would flash into view on the cone’s surface, then stretch and melt away into the mass. I wasn’t sure whose power was greater now, but I was sure Roderick’s was growing.
Mid-prayer, I switched my command to “Break hold.” Roderick seemed to have the same idea at the same time, as we were flung apart from each other. As I stumbled backward, Roderick gracefully rolled off the side of the table closer to the energy portal and onto his feet. His hand was barely cut, but smoke was rising from inside of the poppet. Roderick gave the poppet a kiss and said, “Thank you, Tituba,” then tossed it aside.
Tituba. Had Grace’s ancestor designed the poppet for use against all Endicotts? Morton mind games—I couldn’t let him distract me. I held my sword up at ready. Roderick worked his way around the table, but kept his distance from me. The otherworld’s wind no longer forced me back, and the howl of the damned was now just a low, almost mechanical growl. The dead world’s energy was focusing further on Roderick, following him around like an umbilicus. Within the black-lit aura of his face, the whites of his eyes glowed red and deadly at me.
But Roderick was not the worst thing that I could see. My preternatural eye caught a retinal flash of the world beyond the rift. The Left-Hand gods had always been a joke in my family; their “indescribable horror that drove men mad” was a testament to weak Morton minds. But now I saw, I felt, the merest hint of such a being, and I wasn’t laughing. This beast, assembled from the unnumbered dead of an alternate Earth, strained against the bars between dimensions, hungry and slavering, rabid and insatiable. With his small, domesticated lapdog of a death machine, Roderick was sawing at the damned bars.
Nothing in Family history indicated that Roderick was suicidal, so I tried reason. “You’re going to turn this world into one of the dead zones. You’ll destroy the Earth and yourself with it.”
“There are always other worlds,” he said.
All kinds of problems with that idea, but I didn’t think he was serious. “You’re risking this world for a mirage of power.”
Roderick laughed. “Look around you! This is what the powerful do. What those you serve have done and will do, even if I do not. In as many ways as their folly can conceive, they risk the world, and for far less cause than I.”
Roderick was giving me time, which confirmed that he must be growing more powerful. I had to stop him and heal the breach between the worlds soon, before that thing got through. I advanced on him with my sword. Roderick coolly drew out a pen-sized tube and flicked it forward. A line of metal as long as my blade sprung out. “I had this made especially for you,” he said. “It’s diamond hard with a molecular edge. When Abram dismembered me with that kitchen knife of yours, I felt every cut. I shall serve you as he served me.”
The Endicott sword was state-of-the-art seventeenth-century tech. Roderick would chop me and my weapon to pieces. But only if my spiritual power failed me first.
Lord Jesus, blunt his edge and protect your servant, amen. Blade met blade, and sparks like a grinder’s wheel flew, but my family weapon held against his flying edge. I felt as energized as I had in the Chunnel. In a flash, I knew: this was how it’d always been with those named, terrible swift swords. It had really been the wielder’s power, and when the wielder died, Excalibur and Durendal and all the rest just became hunks of metal, unless a new spiritual master found them.
“In God’s name,” I prayed, “thou shalt not move!” Like his meat puppet in Kiev, Roderick hesitated, but only for a fraction of a combat second, too short to take advantage of without some other ploy.
The duel went on, thrust, parry, lock. With each blow, our conflicting powers seemed to precede our weapons like penumbras and clash before matter connected. Energy flowed through my hands into my sword, and flames were flickering from my fingertips. My burning skin smelled like bad barbecue, but Left-Hand nanites kept rebuilding it.
&nb
sp; Though snaky lines of healing continually repaired him, Roderick’s flesh seemed to be faring far worse. He was burning all over, playing a faster variation on his eternal decay. His head wasn’t much better than the oozing thing we had found in H-ring. But his strength and quickness only seemed to increase, demanding more from me.
“Why?” he asked, thrusting in again for a heart or lung. “Why haven’t you incinerated yourself yet?”
Hell, he was figuring it out. For the first time in our fight, I feared Roderick more than the thing from the other world. I needed to finish this soon. Where the living heck was Rezvani?
In a stunning gambit, Roderick struck out, barely cutting the skin of my shoulder, but leaving himself badly unbalanced. As if my sword remembered its taste for Roderick’s flesh, I gave him a quick and deep stab to his gut for his error.
Face contorted in pain, Roderick pulled out from the blade and skipped out of reach. Then he smiled at me like a mischievous schoolboy caught in a prank. A drop of my blood was on the tip of his strange weapon. He flicked the drop onto a finger, then stuck the finger to his tongue, tasting. His smile broadened. “I’ve been a fool.”
I was already running for the door, yelling, “Scherie! Dale! Now!” Every bit of spiritual lore told me what would happen next. Like would call to like, and I was suffused with Left-Hand craft.
The door was bolted shut. I pounded on it. “Open, in the name of God!”
“My children,” said Roderick. “Please hold him still and silent and take his craft for yourselves.”
The nanites heard their master’s call. I was frozen in place. I prayed mutely and desperately for release and for harm to Roderick, but nothing happened.
“Please drop his weapon,” said Roderick. My sword fell from my hand and clanged to the ground.
I felt his finger trace my shoulders as he walked around me, admiring his work. “I cannot believe it. You used my serum. Another Endicott has fallen to Left-Hand craft. I did not notice your transgression, not with all the other craft in the room and in you, but now I know. You have my blood in your veins. You are mine.”
Once again, he brandished his alchemical-tech blade. “I think I will start with your feet.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Grace Marlow retreated into the woods at an indirect angle, uphill and away from an imaginary line that ran through the bunker entrance and back toward the road, as she expected whoever arrived next to at least investigate if not occupy some position close to that line. She set up a sniper’s nest in the brush behind a rotting log, though she lacked an appropriate sniper’s rifle. She sighted down the hill in the direction of the way back to the road, targeting one tree, then another. Then she panned about and around. They could come from any direction, though the path she’d taken from the road was the easiest.
The ground felt cold and wet, and she could do nothing about that or her visibility. She was a mundane, ordinary. She still had her conventional training, but she’d lost her preternatural edge. This was more than a problem in self-image or combat skills. If incoming forces were misguided friendlies, she would just try to keep them occupied. If they were Left-Hand hostiles, she would want to start killing them immediately. Being able to see their craft would have helped. At least she wouldn’t show up as a practitioner in their craftsight, which might skew their tactics.
Below her, through the doorway and down that sloping tunnel, Michael was probably going to die. That beautiful soul would be apart from her for the rest of her life.
The spooky Ukrainian Lara had followed Grace, but instead of hiding she’d gone into the stealth mode that her people did so well. She’d dropped the flechette rifle to the ground, where it became visible just a yard away. Lara herself was close enough that Grace could hear her breathing.
“You might share some of that stealth,” said Grace.
“No,” said Lara.
“Why?”
“I am busy with problem. How to touch, how not to touch.”
Soldiers had been shot for a lesser refusal, but that would just attract attention. “You’re making this difficult,” was all Grace said. She was trying to prepare her mind for the necessary combination of skill and sacrifice.
“Courage is Grace under pressure,” said Lara. A pause. “I see the ghosts hover near and clear. Poor starved ghosts.”
Though Grace had been able to see the powerfully manifesting Madeline, she still couldn’t see these mundane ghosts. She kept trying to perform some spiritual work that would bring her preternatural talent back. She softly spoke, chanted, and sang words in Latin, English, and even a little Greek. She had traveled the world, and she had never experienced a day without access to the fountain of spiritual power. But she had never been to the United States, only Canada.
Maybe she was somehow antithetical to this country. It had enslaved her ancestors, and they had left it as soon as they were able. Did she have to placate this land in some way? The very thought threatened to enrage her. Or was she supposed to formally marry Michael to be naturalized to this country’s craft? A little late for that in a number of ways.
The damp chill inexorably seeped through her clothes and into her bones, turning minutes into hours. Then, human noises from down the path. Whoever and whatever they were, they were making a bloody racket.
Grace whispered, “Are they Left Hand?”
“I am still thinking,” said Lara.
Six people emerged into the open. They weren’t devoting much attention in her direction; rather, with minimal cover, they set up to meet whatever would come up the path next. No big weaponry either. Grace guessed that these were would-be Left-Hand protectors of Roderick who hoped to profit from life extension.
More very long minutes. Then louder, machine noises from the woods. Grace guessed that an ATV was towing something very large and explosive. These would be the orthodox craft servicepeople with the bomb that Michael had predicted.
Through craft and skill, the Left-Hand defenders had become more difficult to spot. Grace very much wanted to join the orthodox newcomers and warn them about the ambush awaiting them. A straight-up firefight, and then Grace could delay their destruction of the bunker.
But no, Grace had to act sooner and in a way that left her an independent agent for whatever followed. With only a second’s deliberation, she fired off a round into the woods and over the head of the newcomers. A chaos of crossfire ensued, including some fire that hit a tree behind her. Both the newcomers in the woods and ambushers on the near ground might have some idea she was up here.
The tree behind Grace exploded, and Grace felt sudden pain. Bloody hell, a dart of wood was sticking up out of her back like a hedgehog spine. A thud next to Grace, then Lara appeared, lying beside her, stealth dropped. A longer and thicker piece of tree shrapnel was sticking out of Lara’s upper arm.
“Ouch,” said Lara. She pulled the shrapnel out, examined it briefly, and flicked the blood on it toward Grace. “Ah, problem solved.” She was nodding emphatically.
Not getting this, Grace reached around and pulled the oversized sliver from her back. Lara asked, “Do you have cloth?”
Just then, Madeline Morton manifested above them. Any other day, and Grace might have been terrified. Instead, as she turned onto her back and started cutting and ripping a piece of her camo blouse for Lara and herself, Grace greeted Madeline with “You haven’t proven very useful.”
“We’ve been working here,” said Madeline. “Ben and Will headed some of the unknowns off.”
“Why did the dead get into the bunker then?”
“Because I didn’t foresee the fucking Ukrainians.”
“I did,” said Lara, as she snagged the whole piece of shirt before Grace could rip it into narrower strips and, instead of bandaging or tying off her arm, dabbed different parts of the fabric in her blood.
Below, Left Hand and orthodox were still firing at each other, but neither side seemed to have further interest in Grace’s position
. Grace heard the shouts of soldiers calling in more support. Nothing further of interest would happen here before the end.
Grace kept her eyes on the fighting, but she had a question for Madeline. “I need to get my spiritual power back. What rite will work to get this land to accept me?”
“You need your craft?” In a flash, Madeline was in front of her, in her face and obscuring the view, sneering and snarling. “Maybe this land wants you to come crawling back, to beg forgiveness for your ancestors’ leaving it just because of a little misunderstanding over human bondage. So get down on your knees, bitch, and crawl.”
The rage in Madeline’s voice was startling. But Grace Marlow understood the anger, because she’d been thinking that this was exactly what she might have to do, and how much she would hate herself and this land if that were so. It wasn’t, and that was what Madeline was telling her, in her own ironical, Left-Handed way.
“Thank you,” said Grace.
“Don’t thank us,” said Madeline, voice not softening at all with the loss of irony. “We’d love to see you and Endicott die, and soon. But Dale and Scherezade are mine, and you are the tool at hand.”
“No. I am not your tool,” said Grace, and like a fierce libation she jabbed the wooden dart with her blood on it into the ground. In her mind’s view, Grace wasn’t lying flat behind cover, but standing, as she addressed the forest, and the creeks, and the sky. She would tell them the truth in words very different from what Michael had sung in the Chunnel.
“I am Grace Marlow, descendant of Tituba and of Toby Howe, who were brought to this land against their will and forcibly enslaved. The Howes fought against their oppressors and chose freedom in another land. By grace of God, I am a spiritual practitioner in the service of the Crown of the United Kingdom. I owe you nothing. Yet I have come to aid this country in its time of need. Perhaps I shall stay, and perhaps I shall not, but by God, you shall do me the spiritual courtesy of allowing me my powers and privileges here.”
