Interim Errantry

by Diane Duane

  Things around them went black, and then bright again. Nita glanced around hurriedly, trying to get her bearings.

  The harvest moon had risen some hours earlier, and now it stood high over a rather sad and lonely landscape. Long ridges where pumpkins had been planted and raised ran down the length of the field, and from the ridges straggled tired-looking pumpkin vines. Some of these were withered and dying: others were still alive, but had only small or misshapen pumpkins left attached to them. The field was surrounded by windbreak trees on all four sides, with here and there a break or a gate through which tractors could drive in, and off to one side, a long line of plain wooden tables where the people who came to pick the pumpkins could clean up what they picked before paying for them.

  Everything looked monochrome in the moonlight, ever so faintly golden, and very still. There was no sound. Nothing moved. The pirate, the caveman, the Jedi and the alien princess stood looking around them, not speaking for the first few moments.

  “Okay,” Nita said to Jackie at last. “We’re here. What’s the problem?”

  Something bad is happening in the ground, Jackie said. It was happening before. But it’s much worse now. It’s trying to get out—

  They all stood still in the silence, looking, listening—

  And then a pale thin hand shot up out of the damp crumbly dirt and grabbed Dairine by the ankle.

  She shrieked at the top of her lungs, jumped back about three feet, and then staggered and nearly fell down, for the hand hadn’t let go of her ankle, and the arm behind it was pulled further up out of the ground and kept hanging on. A second later the blue-white fire of her lightsaber broke loose, and Dairine sliced the arm off at the elbow. She then spent the next few seconds jumping up and down and trying to dislodge the hand, which still wouldn’t let go—

  All around them in the field, other bumps and lumps started heaving themselves up out of the dirt—skinny fleshless hands scrabbling at it, knobbly shoulders and backs heaving up, whole lank tatter-clad human shapes struggling up on hands and knees, staggering erect; blind faces and empty eyes searching for signs of life in the field, targeting on it, lurching toward it. Nita knew immediately that these weren’t actual high-end zombies of the animated-full-corpse type. But they were more than undead enough to be going on with: staggering cobbled-together shapes meant to inflict terror, disgust and despair. They had a blunt, insufficiently-detailed look to them that in some ways was worse than genuine rotting human corpses would have been. And they were unquestionably the bearers of a message: Take… Me… seriously!

  “Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks cubed!” Ronan said. “What on earth brought this shite on?”

  “Our old buddy,” Kit said. “Taking advantage of the moment.” He scowled and pulled out his wand. “Too many people have the idea that the forces of evil are stronger tonight… so to some extent, they really are. Lean that much conviction up against reality, and it frays around the edges a little. Then You Know Whose little friends that hang around the edges of existence to do Its dirty work jump right in and use the available energy to make mischief—”

  “You call this mischief??” Dairine shouted. She’d finally stopped jumping around in sheer gross-out mode, and paused long enough to simply pull the gripping hand off her ankle by brute force. Then she sliced and diced it thoroughly where it lay on the ground, and having done that, spent a few moments jumping up and down on the pieces in infuriated disgust, yelling, “Eww, eww, eww!!”

  Ronan burst out laughing as the tatty dark shapes came lurching and staggering closer and closer to the wizards in the darkness, bits and pieces occasionally falling off them as they came. The laughter had a slightly panicky edge to it, though, and after a moment Ronan got his control back as he reached inside his costume’s tunic. “Sorry, sorry,” he said as he pulled out something hard to see, “honestly. I just keep expecting them to start dancing. Naturally you guys are carrying—”

  Nita ripped her wand out of its sheath and shook all the safeties off the spells in her charm bracelet. Kit threw his plastic sword away and pulled his Edsel-antenna wand out too. “Time to make a stand,” Nita said. “We let It mess up Halloween, it’ll be coming after Hanukkah or Christmas next!” She whispered a word or two, and the rowan wand blazed with ready power. “You hear me?” Nita yelled, not just at the growing numbers of oncoming, shambling undead, but at the amused Power responsible for them and doubtless watching this whole thing. “I am taking Halloween back, and you are not getting away with this! Not on my patch!”

  “What she said,” Ronan said. And the unseen something in his hands abruptly expanded into what at first glance looked like another caveman club of some kind. It was definitely a club, though, broad and flat and kind of rounded at the business end, narrower down at the handle, and burning inside with a peculiar pale brown light.

  “Ronan,” Kit said. “You finally got that thing built!”

  “I surely did,” Ronan said. “Say hello to the Magic Hurley!” And from under his caveman skin he pulled a small round core of blinding yellow light that he tossed into the air. “Watch the sliotar, boys!” he yelled, and whacked the ball of light at better-than-fastball speed hard into the nearest zombie.

  It exploded, arms and legs and pieces of other whatnot flying yards away. Ronan pulled out another of the sliotar-bombs, tossed it, hit it with unerring aim at the next nearest zombie. It blew up too.

  Unfortunately Nita noticed that as soon as the pieces fell to the ground, the earth started humping and bumping up underneath them, and shortly each piece was a whole new zombie that headed right back toward the four wizards. “Guys,” she shouted, “this situation’s math is not working in our favor!”

  “They need to be completely destroyed,” Kit yelled back as he targeted one and then another of the zombies with the laser-like output from his antenna wand. They went down, but also quickly got up again. “Vaporized! Or canceled out or something!”

  “And how is this even happening?” Dairine yelled, slicing another zombie right in two, only to see the two halves each make another of themselves. “There aren’t any bodies buried here!”

  “Not sure there need to be,” Ronan said, in one of those extremely rational tones of voice he acquired sometimes. He whacked another magic sliotar at a zombie and neatly took the head off, then scowled as its head grew another body and its body grew another head with unnerving speed. “Think about it. For more complicated reanimation spells, you can make do very nicely with human byproducts, human… waste. That winds up in all kinds of places, and even after you process it…”

  Nita rolled her eyes as the white rowan-fire wrapped around a zombie and blasted it backwards, and it too got up again. “Too much information, Ronan!”

  “No, seriously, think about it. Think about all the stuff that was you, once, or part of you, that gets thrown out or goes down the toilet and gets into the waste treatment system. I mean, besides the usual stuff. Hair. Dandruff. Tissues you’ve sneezed in. Nail clippings—”

  “How many toenails does it take to make up a whole person??” Dairine hollered at him as she sliced her way out of a group of the zombies that was converging on her, and within a few breaths found herself dealing with an even bigger group. “Did I ever want to be thinking about this? Will the inside of my head ever be clean again? Somebody better get me some Clorox after we’re done here!”

  “Consider it revenge for your bedspread,” Ronan said. “But I think whoever grew these had better look into their fertilizer’s supply chain. The raw materials aren’t the real problem, though—”

  “It’s what’s animating these things!” Kit said. “And what is animating them? We can’t stop them if we don’t know what’s making them go—”

  Bobo, Nita said, hurry up and get me a reading! She gasped for breath as she shot down another zombie and it started putting itself together.

  I’ve got one, the peridexis said, and you won’t like it.

  I’m already well along the not
-liking-it spectrum at the moment! What are they??

  The animating entities are yangshi.

  Dairine looked up in alarm as she caught Bobo’s data via Spot. “Oh, crap!”

  “Wow, and to think I was just worried about them eating my flesh,” Kit said, the sarcasm not hiding his growing unease at all well.

  Nita, for her part, gulped and kept fighting, but now she too was getting freaked. Thinking of yangshi as demons was almost giving them too much credit. But as the Lone Power’s minions went, they were nasty. Yangshi needed living creatures’ life force to survive, and they got it by prolonged physical contact, during which they sought to bite or wound the victim. If one of them had time to get so much as a tooth into you, that would be the end of it all. Might be quick, Nita thought, or might take a long time.

  But let the wound be as little as a snakebite, or as big as a whole leg pulled off, it wouldn’t matter. Every sentient living thing came equipped with an invisible barrier layer that kept its soul bound inside its physical structure. The yangshi’s bite would open up a wound in the boundary layer that couldn’t be healed and would only tear wider with time. Inevitably the soul would leak out, and when the body no longer contained the threshold amount of soulstuff necessary to sustain the body/soul matrix, the spirit would go and the body would die.

  “This is just to wear us out,” Kit yelled as he kept fighting. “They’re gonna dogpile us and put us out of the running for good if we don’t think of something real fast!”

  “Right,” Dairine said, backing away in a hurry from the yangshi zombies that were trying to engage her. “Time to get radical.” She started pulling the top of her inner tunic askew.

  Kit gave her an almost comical look as he kept fighting. “Not exactly the time for a striptease, Dair!”

  “Not what I have in mind. Somebody mentioned vaporizing them?” Dairine got a grip on what suddenly gleamed bright at her neck in the moonlight: a pale golden torc with a big yellow cabochon stone set in it. She started talking very fast in the Speech, something Nita had trouble getting a handle on because of the speed and the complexity of the language, something very involved and full of fire imagery. Dairine shouted one last word, stood there with her fists clenched—

  And nothing happened. Dairine cursed and looked desperate, for though the saying goes that “a spell always works,”, nothing can make it work if it’s not plugged into a viable power source of the correct type. “No no no no!” she yelled. “Spot?!”

  “What happened?” Kit said, shooting at another zombie and taking it down, but again not for long, and the crowd of them was now pressing in closer—

  “I was using the Sunstone on Wellakh this morning,” Dairine moaned, “and the damn thing’s still in phase with Thahit, it takes fourteen hours to get back in phase with Sol after I’ve been using it with its home star and I can’t pull power with it yet—”

  Something else then, Nita thought. Vaporization—

  And Kit’s earlier suggestion came back to her. Or canceling them out. If their raw material is coming out of the soil— “You’re a genius!” she yelled at Kit.

  “I am?” he said, shooting again. “That’s nice to know, so maybe you could let me know how before I become a dead genius??”

  She’d been dancing around a lot as she fought, but now Nita made her way hurriedly back to where she’d put Jackie down, and stood next to him. “As soon as we see if this works!” she said. “Buy me a couple of minutes, okay? And then I’m going to need you guys to feed me power.”

  Kit nodded, got Ronan’s and Dairine’s attention, and they formed a loose triangle with Nita at the center. Much as she would rather not have done so, she closed her eyes so she could better see the spell she was going to be building in her head.

  She was furious, but right now that was a useful dividend, and Nita knew how to make that work for her: she let the anger build. It’s not bad enough we have to deal with the Lone Power while we’re on active errantry, but it comes after us when we’re just having a little off time? This sucks. She scowled. This is not how I had my evening planned! A little candy, a little fun walking around and seeing everybody’s costumes and enjoying being dressed up ourselves. And then a little private time with Kit out in the quiet and the dark, just a little time during which the two of them were for a change not saving the world… Or blowing up zombies!

  But instead, what do I get? I’m part of the evening’s entertainment! Nita could just imagine the Lone Power sitting somewhere comfy, in a big black armchair or something, with its feet up, sipping a nice hot pumpkin spice latte and watching all this unfold. And then probably recording it somehow and sticking it up on Evil-Minion YouTube to share with all Its little followers. She scowled harder, opening her eyes. Yeah, well, I’ve got your pumpkin latte right here, nuisance boy!

  She grinned. Sun and water, Nita thought. But especially sun. Bobo, that complete dissociation matrix we were looking at a month or so ago? The one ‘too unpredictable and violent for everyday use?’

  I do remember that coming up for study, yes…

  Crack it out and restructure it for organic input.

  Organic?

  Get busy!

  She picked Jackie up and looked him? her? whatever—in the eye. “How would you like to get out there,” she said, “and have a chance to be the pumpkin you only ever dreamed of being before? The best one. The biggest one. With all the sun you can remember inside you at one time—”

  The feeling of utter longing and desire almost swept her away. If only!

  “Tonight’s the night,” Nita said. “All you have to do is remember that sun. All of it. It’s all inside you… and it’s what’s inside that counts.” She grinned a slightly evil grin. “Can you do that?”

  Can I!!

  “Then get busy and start doing it right now!” Bobo?

  Intention feed’s incoming, Bobo said. It’s considerable.

  It’d better be. Build the spell and give it to me compacted. I need a semiphysical conduit to plug it into Jackie here.

  I have to warn you, the peridexis said, sounding concerned, if your adjunct’s intention flags, the conduit might short out and the spell might fail—

  Better hope it doesn’t, then, Nita said, or Long Island’s gonna be hip deep in zombies by morning. Ready?

  Delivering now.

  The spell flashed into life before her, hanging in the air in a set of nested circles about a foot wide. Okay, Nita said, not quite what I had in mind for this. She reached out to start redrafting the spell, pulling parts of the spell diagram into other configurations. One big circle, three chord lines, a small external power-control circle at the tangent point. Three inclusions. Power envelope… radius of effect… expansion room for the intention statements… Once again she found herself being glad she’d spent so much time on spell construction these last couple of months: it was getting a lot easier to build spells on the fly when the Manual didn’t have exactly what you needed. But that module, yeah, that’ll work, plug that in here. And that one—

  Nita concentrated hard on ignoring the chaos going on around her and looked the spell over carefully, checking the language of it and the way it was arranged. Every spell was about persuasion: this one was about helping Jackie remember all that sun, and more than that, the urge toward life that she’d picked up from it, the desire to get it right and be all you could even if that was just being a pumpkin. This is as good as it gets in the time we have, she thought at last. So let’s see what kind of result this produces. She signed the spell with her name in the Speech and tied it into closed-and-ready mode with the Wizard’s Knot: the whole long Speech-statement, from invocation to incitation, would read itself and execute when Nita pronounced the trigger word. “Kit! Two seconds to check me on this?”

  He knocked down one more zombie while looking the diagram over. “Looks good, better get on with it—!”

  And he was right, because the zombies were pressing in closer and closer all the time. “
So here we go,” Nita said, plucking the bright-burning words and geometrical figures of the spell out of the air and crumpling them together into a little tight-packed ball. She got down beside Jackie, pulled his lid off, and popped the spell inside him, pushing it down against the orange flesh inside and feeling the spell’s short-range power conduit sink in and hook up. The light of the spell shone out through his eyes. How’s that? You feel okay?

  Yes. And none of this would be working this way if you hadn’t scooped out my insides, would it? the pumpkin said.

  Nita nodded, feeling a sudden rush of a weird mixture of satisfaction and excitement: a sense of absolutely being part of a plan, not just making one—a sense of things falling right into place, and of being exactly in the right place at the right time. Nita had heard other wizards call this serendipitous effect “the Big Sync”, and talk about how much fun it could be. Now she grinned, entirely seeing the point. “Okay,” she said. “Kit? Ready when you three are!”

  Kit caught Ronan’s and Dairine’s eyes and started speaking under his breath in the Speech. Nita could feel him laying out the intangible power conduits that would feed the spell power through her. It’ll only take them a few seconds to get hooked up—

  She turned her attention back to the tattered, rotted-looking shapes lurching toward them. “Willing followers of the Fallen,” she said, pulling up one of the shortest of the formal demon-management notifications, “be warned by me! We are on the business of the Powers that Be, and by Their power vested in us, unless you disperse forthwith to your own places, we will utterly undo and abolish you!”

  The zombies paused—

  And kept coming.

  “Last warning, you guys!” Nita said, holding Jackie up. “I’ve got a pumpkin, and I’m not afraid to use it!”

  There was another slight pause—and then a sound that if possible made Nita angrier than before: zombie laughter, the animating yangshi demons making fun of her. They kept on coming.