Fantastic Hope

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  With a loud muttering, the crowd parted and a damaged golem lurched forward, twisted and misshapen. “Rettop! Need repairs! Now!” The deformed golem could barely move, trying to get its clay legs to work. I realized it was the golem smashed by the security ogres at Art’s rally. His name was Tony, according to his forehead.

  The Cavewight clucked his pale tongue against crooked brown teeth. “What a shame! That’s why King Dred keeps me around. Step right up.” He helped the golem to his potter’s wheel and let out a long sigh. “I just want to make vases and pots, but I spend half my time repairing damaged golems.” He clucked his tongue against his teeth again. “Let me see what I can do.”

  With spatulate hands, the Cavewight seized the golem’s chest and shoulders, then worked like a chiropractor, twisting him, straightening him. The clay was pliable enough that Tony eventually straightened. Rettop took palmfuls of fresh clay, using it on the golem instead of his pots. “Lucky you got here in time. If the damage had been more severe, your animation spell might have been broken.” He slathered Tony’s skin, bulked up his back, added to his biceps, even finished with a flourish of a cleft in the golem’s chin. “There, good as new!”

  “About those canopic jars?” said the mummy, his rattling dry voice tinged with impatience.

  Then, not far away, someone screamed a high, terrified shriek, which was always a good way to get attention.

  As a ghost, Sheyenne could move faster than any of us, and she streaked away, waving for us to follow. Robin and Alvina bolted, and I shambled as quickly as I could, getting my body warmed up. Being a detective, I was great at solving mysteries, but chase scenes and action-packed brawls weren’t my specialty.

  A crowd had gathered by the dumpster bins behind Ye Olde Blood Bar. McGoo was already there, trying to hold off the crowds. A banshee barmaid with big hips and a layered skirt screamed and screamed, breaking nearby windows and nearly deafening us all. Sheyenne hovered in the air, her translucent form sparkling with intense anger. McGoo was red-faced.

  Sprawled on the ground in front of the dumpsters were two more dead golems, side by side, their arms at odd angles and their chests split open, the clay pried apart and leaving them hollow: Don and Jim, the golems we had met earlier. Don still wore his yellow dishwashing gloves.

  McGoo bent down beside the eviscerated clay figures. “It’s too late.”

  “Why would anyone want to kill golems?” Robin asked. “And why open them up like that?”

  More clay figures had gathered around, still riled up from Art’s crusade. “Serve, not suffer,” one grumbled. I heard the same words muttered among the others.

  “Something bad is happening here, McGoo,” I said. “Somebody’s cracking open golems, like shucking oysters and hoping to find a pearl.”

  I could tell my best human friend had had enough. He bellowed, loud and clear, “Four golem murders in two weeks! This is a crime scene. This entire Renaissance fair is a crime scene!” He pulled out his radio and called to request backup—all of it. “By order of the Unnatural Quarter Police Department, I declare this fair closed. All the public must leave immediately in a calm and orderly fashion.”

  Security ogres lumbered in to see what the fuss was all about. “Knock some heads!”

  “No, no, just a peaceful evacuation,” Robin insisted. The ogres looked disappointed.

  McGoo said, “Call King Dred. I want all fair employees together on the jousting ground. I need to interrogate everyone.” Sighing, he looked at me. “This is going to be a long day.”

  VI.

  Squad cars arrived before the fair workers organized themselves on the jousting field. The security ogres got into several brawls (with each other, since they’d been given orders not to harm the paying customers), and eventually all of the patrons made their way to the overflowing parking lot, creating a huge traffic jam as they headed back to the Unnatural Quarter.

  King Mortimer Dred stood on the reviewing stand as if this entire meeting had been his idea. McGoo and I sorted the fair workers by species so we could interrogate them better. Robin made sure that every accused monster was properly read its rights. Sheyenne had gotten a treat for Alvina, roasted frogs on a stick, because the little girl was hungry again.

  Trolls, mummies, and werewolves in blacksmith aprons gathered around, as well as Noxius the gremlin and Rettop the Cavewight. The vampire and skeleton jousters stood shoulder to shoulder, and I realized that they were actually close friends, not mortal enemies as the audience had thought. Even Alice the dragon thundered in, landing not far from King Dred’s reviewing stand. Twenty or so golems crowded together, identical except for their various Renaissance costumes.

  McGoo strutted in front of the reviewing stand. “Now that you’re all here, I’ve got—”

  “I’ll take it from here,” Mort boomed from the platform above. When he lifted his hands, his black velvet sleeves fell down to his elbows again. Thunder sounded across the sky, and dark clouds began to form. “I am King Mortimer Dred, your boss.” He strode down from the reviewing stand and marched onto the field, heading straight for the gathered golems.

  McGoo and I hurried after him, trying to regain control of the situation. “What are you doing, sir?” I asked.

  “We have this handled,” McGoo said.

  King Dred ignored us. As he walked past the nearsighted gremlin, he grabbed the furry creature by his scrawny neck and dragged him to stand in front of the golems. “Now that you’re all here in one place, I can get this done in a far more efficient manner. I need Excalibur. I know one of you golems bought it. I know one of you is hiding it.” The king glowered, and his eyes crackled with sparks.

  I looked at the smooth clay golems and wondered where in the world they could manage to hide something as large as a sword.

  “I demand to know which one of you has Excalibur!”

  After a long petrified silence, one golem pushed forward from the back. He seemed taller than the others, exuding power. It was Art, the leader of the golems’ crusade. “And I demand justice for all golems!” he said. “We will serve, but not suffer.”

  The wizard king seemed shocked and intimidated. “You demand nothing! Where is my sword?”

  “The sword belongs to the rightful king,” Art said.

  “Or it belongs in my treasure hoard,” the dragon piped up, “until I lost it in a poker game.”

  “Lost it fair and square,” chirped Noxius.

  “I am the king of the Real Renaissance Faire. I, Mortimer Dred, must draw the sword from the stone as was foretold in the legend.”

  Without flinching, Art placed a gray fist against his soft clay chest. “What if the sword is inside the stone already?”

  I suddenly figured out the only place a golem could hide something as large as a sword, and I knew that Mort Dred understood it as well. “He was looking for the sword!” I said to McGoo, who clearly hadn’t yet received the same revelation. Now the murders all made sense. “Excalibur! Art has it.”

  Like a flasher about to tear open his trench coat, Art plunged his clay fingers down the soft clay of his chest as if pulling a zipper, then he stretched his clay torso apart, opening himself up to expose a golden hilt and the polished steel of a sword blade that ran all the way down inside his back. Excalibur! The legendary blade hidden inside the soft stone body.

  “I have Excalibur,” Art declared. “I am Excalibur! The sword is in the stone.”

  The Cavewight cackled. “It fit perfectly. I thought it was clever.” He held up his splayed hands and waggled his long fingers. “Sealed it right in there for safekeeping.”

  “It’s mine!” Mort lunged forward to grab the golden hilt that protruded from Art’s open chest. “Mine!” He pulled at the sword, struggling to draw Excalibur out of the golem’s body.

  The other golems shifted angrily, getting riled up. The Renaissance fair employees watche
d, and even the dragon Alice peered down as Mort yanked, tugged, dug his feet in the ground and pulled, but Art held the sword inside him. Mort strained to wrench the legendary blade free, but it wouldn’t budge.

  Finally, red-faced, weak-kneed, and exhausted, he staggered back. His golden crown hung askew on his head.

  With perfect timing, Sheyenne appeared in front of him, holding a piece of paper. “You engaged our services to locate the sword Excalibur, Mr. Dred. There it is! Our work is now complete, and here’s our invoice. Payment is due upon receipt.”

  Mort flew into a rage. His curly, golden hair crackled, and his crown popped off his head like a champagne cork as his body filled with sorcerous energy. “I am King Mort Dred, and I am also a great wizard. I call upon the powers of dark magic to give me the sword that is my due. I need Excalibur!” He raised his hands, and lightning crackled from his fingertips. Angry black thunderheads gathered. The ground began to shake.

  Art stood fearless with Excalibur still protruding from his open chest. He wrapped a clay hand around its hilt. “I do not have a heart of clay. I have the heart of a lion! I should be king.”

  “I will destroy all of you,” Mort screamed, and thunder cracked around him for emphasis. “I will shatter every single golem and take the sword from the rubble of your bodies.” He lurched back to summon a huge blast of terrible energy.

  Knowing what I had to do, I didn’t hesitate. I shambled forward, raised my voice. “You look extremely powerful, King Dred. I bet a hundred dollars that no one can stop you.”

  Mort let out a maniacal laugh. “Of course not—”

  Then a huge reptilian foot stomped down on his head, a dragon’s claw that smashed with all the weight of an enormous monster. The blow crushed the Renaissance king into a puddle of bones and flesh.

  Alice let out a roar, and her slit eyes were wide and bright with delight. “I’ll take that bet!” she said. “Did I win?”

  VII.

  Afterward, McGoo and I wrapped up the case while Robin wrote notes on her yellow legal pad for the final summary. Sheyenne took Alvina to get another sugary treat, while we arranged a petty-cash invoice to pay back the hundred-dollar bet.

  McGoo scrutinized the red stain and the crumpled black velvet robes. The painted puppies looked extra sad now. “We know Mort Dred was the murderer, tearing open golems in search of the sword hidden inside.” He wiped his shoe on the grassy ground to get rid of goop he had inadvertently stepped in. “Nothing left to arrest, though.”

  “Case solved,” I said. “My two favorite words in the world.”

  “I like ‘payment complete,’” Sheyenne said, leading Alvina back from a vendor with a frozen blood-pop. “Maybe we can get the Renaissance fair treasurer to pay our bill?”

  Robin shook her head. “Mr. Dred engaged us as a personal matter, not as a corporate contract with the fair itself.”

  Moving proudly among his fellow golems, Art met each one, read their names aloud from their foreheads. The hilt of Excalibur still protruded from his chest like a badge of honor. He had also retrieved the golden crown worn by King Dred, and now he placed it on his own head, the king of the golems and possibly king of the Real Renaissance Faire.

  Art said, “Serve, but not suffer. We must have rights for all golems.”

  Robin walked among them, listening to their grievances. “We can file a formal motion, and I’ll approach the proper governing bodies. I will help ensure that you have good working conditions and proper maintenance.”

  “I’ll help with the maintenance,” said Rettop. The Cavewight was busy making commemorative clay medallions to sell to everyone present at the event.

  “And regular mud baths!” said the golem Tony. Robin dutifully wrote it down.

  Alice flew overhead, thrilled now. Without her knowledge, King Dred had claimed the dragon’s entire treasure hoard as collateral, which he leveraged to finance the Real Renaissance Faire. Now that Dred had been properly squashed, Alice found that she now owned the entire operation. She was so ecstatic she did barrel rolls and loop-the-loops in the air.

  “She still needs counseling for that gambling problem,” Sheyenne said, “or she’ll lose it all again.”

  Art strode up. “I will be her business adviser. Instead of the Real Renaissance Faire, we will call this the Fair Renaissance Faire, so that all can feel good about themselves when they attend.”

  The armored vampire knight and the skeleton knight joined each other on the jousting field, practicing with their swords. The dragon crashed down in front of them, and the two costumed knights ran forward to challenge her in a mock battle. With a beat of her wings, Alice knocked them both flat, but the unnatural knights sprang to their feet and ran into the melee, all in good fun.

  “I still want a dragon,” Alvina said.

  “Maybe when you’re older, honey,” Sheyenne said.

  “You could have one at McGoo’s apartment for the nights you stay with him,” I suggested.

  He glared at me. “Let’s start you out with a salamander first.”

  REPRISE

  A QUINCY HARKER, DEMON HUNTER SHORT STORY

  JOHN G. HARTNESS

  I’ve never liked Jersey City. It always feels to me like the sixth borough, one with an inferiority complex, a Chihuahua of a city jumping around and yipping at you while the big dogs try to ignore it. I liked it even less right after World War II, when Boss Hague was running the place with an iron fist wrapped tight around the balls of the law and you could find yourself wearing cement overshoes if you didn’t bribe the right city officials, or if your bribe wasn’t respectful enough.

  I’m not really the respectful type, and I was a lot less so then. Believe it or not, I’ve mellowed. I somehow made it through my two years living in the shadow of the Big Apple, and even grew to like the greater New York metro area. But never Jersey City. It always sucked. But, after I finally reconnected with Uncle Luke and the man currently answering to the title of Renfield, Jersey City was close enough for me to stay in contact with the closest thing I had to a family, but far enough away that said family didn’t show up unexpectedly for dinner. Because when your only “family” is Count Dracula, the last thing you want is him popping over for a bite.

  I lived for a time on the third floor of a brownstone at the corner of York and Barrow, a nice building called Madison Standing. I liked my apartment; it was close to the library, close to the water, and far enough away from the city that I could stay mostly underground. There’s not a lot of supernatural activity in New Jersey, so I could just keep my head down and try to rebuild myself after the war.

  I spent a good chunk of 1949 sitting under a tree in the park reading, or thinking, or poking at the gaps in my memory and trying to remember what happened between the time I flew into a rage in France and the time I came back to myself in the Arizona desert three years later. No matter how many books I read or how many hours I spent looking up at the clouds or stars, no hint of those lost years came to me.

  The days were fine. The nights, less so. I saw her eyes every time I closed my own; Anna’s eyes full of tears for her lost brother, then wide with shock and pain as the sword plunged through her, then finally dead and glassy and staring up at me from the floor of the French villa where she died. I dove headlong into a fury that consumed me for years and resulted in a level of bloodshed usually only available to governments.

  That’s what had me walking through Van Vorst Park at half past midnight on the twenty-first of June. I had no idea it was the solstice; my magic isn’t tied to the seasons or the planetary alignment, so I was expecting to have the park to myself, or maybe share it with a couple of winos sitting under the oaks. I was not expecting a circle of young people bathed in candlelight and chanting in Enochian.

  There were eight of them, all shrouded in long black robes with hoods pulled up over their heads. Not content with merely using the hoo
ds to mask their identity, they also had dark cloths covering their faces, completely obscuring any details about them. Even with my heightened senses, all I could pick out was a little bit of pale skin around their eyes. They were all of middling size, no one tremendously tall or exceptionally short, and none looked particularly overweight or muscular. Just a cluster of medium-sized practitioners of the dark arts working a summoning in the park in the middle of the night.

  Curious, I stepped forward. They stood in a circle in the park’s gazebo, four at the cardinal compass points and the others making a larger ring at the intercardinals. From the ground, I couldn’t see the floor, but there seemed to be five candles, and they were spaced as though they occupied the points of a pentacle. These kids were casting something, and it definitely didn’t feel like something I wanted happening less than a block from where I slept. I slipped behind some bushes and called up power.

  “Audite spatium,” I whispered, barely breathing the words as I wove my spell. I pushed a little sphere of pure will through the space between me and the chanting children, and as my spell took effect, I could hear them as clearly as if I stood in the center of their circle.

  The words were guttural, gravelly, more like coughing than speech, but I knew it. I knew it all too well, I soon realized. This was a ritual to summon a demon. A major demon, a General at least, and possibly even one of the Lords of Hell. Yeah, definitely not something I wanted anywhere near where I lay my head.

  “Ventus,” I breathed, pursing my lips and blowing a steady stream of air toward the gazebo. The candle nearest me flickered and went out.

  “Aww, darn it,” I heard one of the chanters say in a disappointed male voice. I heard the unmistakable clink of a Zippo flipping open, and a few seconds later the candle flared to life again.

  I poured a little more power into my wind this time, and once again whispered, “Ventus.” The breeze was stronger this time, snuffing two candles instead of just the one. Zippo bent down and relit them both.