The Black Knight Chronicles (Omnibus Edition)

by John G. Hartness

  “My cousin. My family,” Sabrina said from beside me. Her Smith & Wesson service pistol wasn’t pointed at Otto, but it was out and ready.

  “Can’t we all calm down and discuss this logically?” Mike said.

  He put a hand on Sabrina’s shoulder, pushing her gently back to the sofa. Then he moved in front of me, putting his face in my line of fire. I lowered my gun. This was not the night to be shooting my friends in the face. Not with more appealing targets right there in the room. I sat back down on the arm of the couch.

  “Good,” Mike said. “Now, let’s question our friend Otto, shall we?” He turned to the faerie, put his hand on his cross and rested the other hand on the bald man’s forehead and said “Do you swear in the sight of God to tell me the truth?”

  “I am of the Fae, minister. I cannot lie. It is not in my nature,” Otto replied.

  “Yeah, I read that somewhere,” Greg said.

  “Greg, that was an Alex Craft novel. It wasn’t exactly a scholarly work.” I pointed to his copy of Grave Witch on an end table.

  Greg had fallen in love with the author when he saw her picture on a website. I didn’t blame him. Blue-haired chicks in corsets are hot. But they are not necessarily reliable primary research sources.

  “Regardless, I am incapable of lying directly,” Otto said. “Ask me anything, I must tell you the truth or not answer at all.”

  “Did you harm Stephen Neal?” Mike asked.

  “No. From the information Greg gave me, I would guess that he was attacked by a troll wearing poisoned blanthrons.”

  “Will he recover?” Sabrina asked.

  “Not without an antivenin prepared from the leaves and roots of the verdirosa plant,” Otto said.

  “Which only grows in Faerieland.” I really didn’t want to go to Faerieland.

  “Correct,” Otto replied.

  “What happens to Stephen if he doesn’t get this antivenin?” Sabrina asked.

  “He will die. Depending on the exposure, he has three or four days to live without treatment.”

  “Crap. Then I guess we go to Faerieland,” I said. “Just one question. How do we get there?”

  “I am a Knight-Mage of the Fae, and I can grant us passage into the lands of House Armelion,” Otto said.

  He waved his arms and a brilliant golden glow surrounded him. I turned away from the bright lights, and when I looked back at him he was standing in front of my couch wearing golden chain mail and a helmet. The sword that he conjured up in the troll fight was strapped across his back with the hilt poking over one shoulder, and he looked nothing like the human bouncer that had stood in my den a few seconds before. He looked alien somehow, like his features were just a little too angular, his eyes just a little too blue to be real. And his ears had tapered to distinct points. I also noticed a hint of fang when he spoke, so it looked like Greg and I weren’t the only ones vying to be top of the food chain.

  “How did you do that?” Sabrina asked, gaping at him.

  “My human appearance was a glamour. This is my true self.” He smiled, as if he knew how ridiculously good-looking he was, and I started to feel a little self-conscious. I marched over to the coat closet and grabbed my shoulder rig and duster and started arming up.

  “Trolls can do that? The glamour thing?” Greg asked.

  “Yes,” Otto replied. “That is how they manage to pass among humans without notice. They appear to be nothing more than boorish, overweight humans that smell bad.”

  “So you mean like the typical American,” Mike said wryly. I noticed that he was seated at Greg’s computer.

  “You not coming with us, Dad?” I asked.

  “No, Jimmy, I think an excursion to Faerieland might be pushing the bounds of my ordination a little too far. I’ll stay here and consult my sources to any information we can find on this side of the veil about trolls and faeries,” he answered with a wave to the computer.

  “In other words, you’re going to hang out with the cute witch that has an unreasoning bias against vampires,” Greg observed.

  Our priestly friend at least had the good grace to blush slightly. “I will indeed be visiting my Wiccan friend, and you must admit that a human’s fear of vampires isn’t exactly unreasoning. You do look upon us as a source of nutrition, after all. I’ll also stop by the hospital tomorrow morning and see how your cousin is doing, Sabrina.”

  With that, Mike finished his drink and headed upstairs, moving a little more slowly than I remembered. I looked after him a little worriedly. Mike had taken a couple of tough shots in our last big fight, and my friend’s mortality was fresh in my mind. I was honestly a little relieved that he wouldn’t be joining us on this trip. I had enough on my plate looking after Sabrina and making sure that Greg didn’t fall in love with a faerie girl.

  I finished gearing up and walked over to Otto. “All right, Mr. Spock, how do we do this?”

  He either ignored or didn’t get my Star Trek reference and said, “First, you must all remove anything made of iron or steel that you have on your persons, including your guns.”

  I held both hands in the air and protested, “Oh hell no. You want me to go into a magical wonderland and meet with fantastical creatures on their home turf, and now you want me to do it unarmed? You gotta be nuts, baldy.”

  “This is not a point of discussion, vampire. Cold iron is lethal to my people, and to carry it into a meeting is a grave insult. You may bring weapons of bronze, or silver, but no iron or steel can be on your persons.” Otto crossed his arms and stared at me stubbornly.

  I looked at Sabrina and Greg for support, but all I saw was two people busily divesting themselves of any metal.

  “What about zippers?” Greg asked, pointing to the crotch of his jeans.

  “Modern jeans use brass or aluminum zippers, so they’re fine,” Otto replied.

  I took a look at Sabrina’s nightclub ensemble and figured that wouldn’t be the best thing for traipsing around a magical kingdom picking poisonous plants in, so I grabbed a spare pair of sweats for her out of my bedroom, along with the Sandman T-shirt she’d declined earlier, and she went into the bathroom to change.

  I found a belt that I remembered had a solid titanium Batman belt buckle (don’t ask), and loaded a pair of matching silver daggers into it. I poked around my room for a minute and found a tall staff I’d bought at a Ren Faire back before I turned. I slipped on a pair of black leather gloves to let me handle the silver daggers without any adverse effects, and I was ready to rock. Greg found a nightstick and a pair of brass knuckles, and when Sabrina came out of the bathroom I passed her a baseball bat I kept in the closet. All in all we looked like a cross between a demented sports team and the Fellowship of the Ring.

  “Okay, Otto, let’s go see the faeries,” I said when we were all suitably, if ridiculously, attired.

  “Before we go,” he replied, “I should tell you something of our land. We will attempt to meet with Milandra, the Queen of House Armelion. There may be challenges set for us before we are allowed into her presence, to prove our worth. You must not protest these challenges, or you may be killed outright. Ours is an old society, much older than any human civilization, and our traditions are strong. We are a long-lived people, and change is slow to come to the Fae. We are not like humans, who change with the direction of the wind.”

  I noticed that Otto’s speech had changed as he got closer to going home. He started to sound a lot more like one of Tolkien’s elves and less like the bouncer at a gay bar in North Carolina.

  “I get it,” I said. “Don’t piss off the faeries, they’ll kick my ass. Now can we move this party along? I’d like to be there and back again before daylight. I didn’t pack my sunscreen.”

  “Very well, vampire. I can see that you will simply have to experience this for yourself. Please remember, stay close to me and try, please try, to keep your mouth shut.” With that, he made some kind of hoodoo gesture in the air, and a shimmering portal of light appeared in my living room
. “Step through, each of you. I will hold the portal here and follow.”

  “I just hope that thing doesn’t stain my carpet,” I said, and stepped through the hole in the air to Faerieland.

  Chapter 13

  I stepped through the glowing yellow circle and right out the other side. I could tell immediately that I wasn’t in Kansas, or North Carolina, anymore. For one thing, the sky was a pale pink with fluffy purple clouds. For another thing, it was daylight, and I wasn’t bursting into flames. I got out of the way as Sabrina and Greg came through and looked around. Otto followed close behind them and made some hand gestures that closed the portal behind us.

  “It looks like a My Little Pony convention in here,” Greg said. “If anyone would recognize one, it’s you.” I looked over at Otto. “Why aren’t we on fire? It’s daylight, and we’re outside. We should be crispy critters by now.”

  Otto looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “You’re in the HomeLands, vampire. The sunlight cannot harm you here unless the queen deems it so. Do you understand nothing of your nature?”

  “My nature?” I asked. “I’m a vampire. I’m fast, strong, and if I follow a few simple rules I’ll never die. I stay out of the sun, avoid big toothpicks and decapitation, and I have a few dietary restrictions. What else is there to understand?”

  “I was right. You understand nothing. Let it suffice to say that because you are magical in nature, the light of a magical realm cannot harm you. Anything else is not my place to say. But you should seek some insight into the nature of your existence, vampire. You cannot live forever without sometimes peering inwards.”

  “Yeah, yeah, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ and all that. But the point is, we’re made from magic and the sunlight here won’t kill us.” I looked around at the foliage in a rainbow of colors. Orange plants, purple grass, blue clover, the whole place was starting to remind me of a bowl of Lucky Charms.

  “Correct. A vast oversimplification, but it is correct. Now, we must make our way to the Hall of Queen Milandra.” Otto started off down a trail that I hadn’t even noticed before, a beaten track of yellow earth between two tall trees that looked like pines, only with pink and green needles.

  “How long is that going to take? We’re on a little bit of a deadline here,” Sabrina reminded him.

  “It depends on how long you stand there, and how quickly you start moving,” Otto called back to us.

  I started after him, struggling through the undergrowth. As I was fighting with one particularly thorny bush, I heard Greg ask, “What’s up with the Technicolor foliage? It looks like somebody’s TV needs the color calibrated.”

  “I think it’s pretty,” Sabrina replied, and looking back at her I saw a strange look on her face. She looked at peace somehow, and younger. It’s like I was getting a glimpse of the girl she used to be, before she had to become the tough police detective.

  “Our queen has unique tastes in décor, and the realm reflects her desires. Please follow closely. There are things off the paths in Faerie that do not take kindly to visitors,” Otto said as he continued to break a trail ahead of us.

  He didn’t so much cut a path as wave his sword at the undergrowth, and it pulled back enough for us to pass, mostly. Except that the little sticker plants seemed to take a particular glee in poking me in the ass as I walked by. After one particularly sharp jab, I turned around and cut the plant off near the ground with my silver dagger. The stalk hissed and bubbled when I sliced through it with the dagger, and I heard a high-pitched keening wail that sounded as though it came from far away. Otto immediately turned and strode back to where I was standing, sticker plant in hand.

  “What are you doing? I told you to stay close,” he snapped.

  I held the plant up to him and shook it.

  He blanched at the sight of it and snatched it away from me. Then he flung the plant into the woods and leaned in close to my face. “Do you want to die here, you idiot? Do not attack creatures here. You don’t know what they are and you have no idea what they can do to you.”

  “Otto, it’s a plant.”

  “No, it isn’t a plant. That was, for lack of a better word, a finger. A finger of a terranthyl, a creature with a plant-like form that attacks by first separating its prey from a group, then dragging the poor creature off into the woods to be devoured. And now you’ve made it angry. Stay by my side. The terranthyl will not attack a Knight-Mage.

  I kept close to Otto after that, and tried not to look appetizing. We walked for about three miles before the trees parted and we came into a clearing. Or at least I thought it was a clearing at first. When I continued to look around, I realized that the buildings were so carefully integrated into the forest as to appear that they belonged there. A doorway looked more like a natural crack in a rock face, a chimney looked more like a spire of dead tree and windows just looked like extra knotholes in a tree trunk. The houses were so cleverly disguised that unless you knew what you were looking at, you could walk right through the clearing and never have any idea you’d just passed through the heart of town. Otto led us to the base of an enormous tree that I normally would have called an oak, except I’ve never seen a pink and purple paisley oak tree before. We walked up a slight ramp that wound around the tree to a crack in the trunk about eight feet off the ground, where he stopped, removed his helmet and knocked.

  As we waited, Otto looked at me and said, “Please try to be respectful. Milandra is a kind and gentle queen, but she is the absolute ruler here. Her every whim is answered, not just by we who serve her, but by the very land itself.”

  “What makes you think I wouldn’t be respectful?” I asked, feeling a little insulted. Sabrina glared at me, and I shut up.

  After a minute or two of waiting, the door opened, and we stepped into the greatest great hall I’d ever seen. The floor was pink marble, shot through with veins of lavender, pale blue and flecks of white. The ceiling, which must have been thirty feet above us, was painted (or magicked) into looking just like the sky outside, only this was an earthly blue sky with white clouds. There were even birds flying across, which gave me even more reason to believe there was magic involved.

  The walls were cut from even more marble, fading slowly from the pink of the floor to the sky blue as they went up. And at the far end of the hall, at least a football field away, stood a twenty-foot dais with a throne on it surrounded by ladies in waiting. A double column of armored knights lined the hall leading to the throne, and every faerie in the honor guard made Otto look like the “before” pic in one of those old Charles Atlas ads from the back of a comic book. They looked at us with undisguised contempt, and I suddenly really, really wanted my guns.

  On the throne sat Milandra, and if there was an encyclopedia entry for “regal,” she’d be the illustration. Tall, blonde and beautiful, with high cheekbones and delicate features, she was everything Hollywood dreamed of when making a Faerie Queen.

  Chapter 14

  We got to the foot of the dais, and Otto poked me in the back again. “Kneel,” he said, doing so himself. I went to one knee and out of the corner of my eye saw Sabrina and Greg doing the same.

  “Rise, Octavian. And please, introduce us to your guests. Two of the Sanguine and a human? You have selected strange companions, Knight-Mage.” Queen Milandra’s voiced poured over us like honey, but I could tell that there was a bee sting in there somewhere from the way Otto stiffened.

  He bowed his head again and answered, “Your Majesty, may I introduce Detective Sabrina Law, a Peacekeeper of her realm, and her lieutenants, James and Gregory, of the Sanguine.”

  “It is our pleasure to meet you, Lady Law, and your servants.”

  I stopped thinking how adorable she was when she got to the bit about servants. I drew in a breath to correct the little Faerie Princess, but Otto shot me another warning look. I shut up, but I was getting a little tired of biting my tongue in the name of interspecies relations.

  “Thank you for receiving us, You
r Majesty,” Sabrina said, stepping forward with a curtsy. She made a warning gesture to me behind her back, and I kept my mouth shut. Now I knew we were in a different dimension, because no way in hell was Sabrina ever going to curtsy to anyone.

  “You are welcome here, Lady. Please treat the Great Hall of Armelion as your home for as long as you require our hospitality.”

  I saw Otto relax when she said that, and I hoped that meant she’d just pledged that no one in her court would try to stake me as long as we were here.

  “Many thanks, Your Majesty.” Sabrina curtsied again, and I heard Gloria Steinem’s ghost screaming in feminist agony somewhere across the dimensional void.

  “Octavian, do you pledge the good behavior of our guests and that they mean no harm to our royal person?” the queen asked Otto.

  He stood up straighter, if that’s possible for someone who was already making a marine at parade rest look like a slinky, and said, “I do, Your Majesty. Upon my honor as Knight-Mage of House Armelion, they shall bring no harm to your person or House.”

  “Fair enough, Otto, fair enough.”

  With that, Queen Milandra waved a hand, and the honor guard all disappeared, along with most of the great hall, leaving behind only two guards and a much smaller sitting room. The guards took up positions beside the door, while Greg and I gaped at the new room. I heard tinkling laughter, and spun around to see Milandra sitting, not on a throne, but on what looked like a very comfy armchair, laughing at our confusion.

  “Oh, I do love visitors!” She exclaimed with glee. “Especially visitors from the mundane world. Your faces are absolutely priceless.” She waved us over to a pair of sofas that had appeared when the room changed. “I prefer to hold audience for friends in my chambers. The great hall is just so drafty this time of year, and no matter how I make the weather outside, it always seems to be chilly in there. I suppose it’s all the marble, but I can’t remake the great hall, you know.”

  I sat on the sofa furthest from the queen and closest to the door, not just to keep my escape clear, but also in case something that didn’t like me came through the door. Not that I had a lot of hope of taking out anything that could get past the kind of magic Milandra was throwing around, but it made me feel better. “Your Majesty,” I began, “We need your help—”