The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross (11 page)

I shrugged and gave her my best devil-may-care look. “Sometimes the greatest risks have the greatest rewards,” I said.

“And you don’t know what else to do,” she said.

“There is that, too,” I said, nodding.

She shook her head. “It was a pleasure playing with you when I could,” she said. “Farewell, pet.”

Then they were gone, exiting the way they’d came. The fog flowed back out after them, like a tide retreating out to sea.

And just like that I was standing in the courtyard of the castle amid the tourists once more. Several of them stopped and stared at me, standing there shirtless and bloodied, with a wet blade in my hand. The only sign the faerie had ever been there was the dark patches on the ground where the bodies had fallen.

Some of the tourists applauded the sight of me, like I was just another performer who had somehow snuck up on them, while others took photos. I glared up at the cameras on the walls. If anyone had missed me before, they wouldn’t now.

“Show’s over,” I said. I threw the sword to the ground and pulled my shirt on again. Then I went back out through the gates of Elsinore before something worse than the faerie came through those gates.

I flew back into Heathrow, disguised as just another businessman on his way to a meeting. The sleight was just an illusion and wouldn’t hold up to any serious scrutiny, but it would be enough to fool the security cameras and bored airport guards. I rented a car and told the agent I had business in Brighton. Then I drove to Stratford-upon-Avon, the final resting place of William Shakespeare.

I adjusted the sleight to change appearances again as I went, so now I just looked like another pensioner on vacation. Once I reached my destination, I left the car in a lot near the river and walked along the Avon for a bit, taking in the trees and swans and tour boats and all the other postcard perfect sights. My wandering eventually led me to the Holy Trinity church, where Will was buried along with his family. I joined the people wandering the grounds, taking photos of the grave markers that surrounded the church, before I went inside. I wanted to make sure I hadn’t been followed from Elsinore or been recognized since my arrival back in England.

I caught sight of a tall figure dressed in black pants and a black coat with the hood up walking past the church grounds. It wasn’t the sort of weather to be dressed like that, so it rang some alarms in my head. But whoever it was kept on walking and that was the end of that. The Black Guard didn’t erupt from the doors of the church, and the dead didn’t rise from their graves. There was nothing to worry about. Not yet, anyway.

In fact, the only people who seemed to notice me at all were an elderly Irish couple who asked me to take a picture of them in front of the church with their camera. I made sure to frame it in a way that didn’t include any grave markers. They’d be getting their share of those soon enough.

When I was confident I looked like just another sightseer, I joined the lineup to go inside the church. I managed to squeeze in between two groups of middle-aged travellers, and both thought I belonged with the other group. I didn’t even have to pay when we went through the doors and into the church.

The inside of the church looked much like other churches of a similar vintage. There were the pews and the stone arches and the stained glass windows featuring various saints and angels. If you’ve seen one church, you’ve seen a thousand churches. The only remarkable thing about it was the grave markers of Will and his family in the chancery, flat stones set into the floor in the fashion of the time. That was what everyone was here to see, of course. I kept on using the tour groups as a cover and moved through the area. I shuffled past the grave markers and read the words inscribed on Will’s grave.

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forebeare

To digg the dust enclosed heare;

Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,

And curst be he that moves my bones.

I supposed it was a threat of some sort, but I wasn’t worried. I was no stranger to curses.

I finished my scouting mission without seeing anything untoward. Which meant nothing, of course. It wouldn’t be much of a security system if I could see it. I left the church and walked the river some more, until I found myself at a pub, which seemed as good a place as any to kill a few hours. I remembered how my current troubles had begun with a trip to the pub, and this time I kept my hands to myself. When night fell and it came time to pay for my drinks, I sent some grace into the outlets in the wall and blew the circuit breakers. The power went out in the pub. By the time the lights came back up, I’d already left the place and was halfway back to the church.

There were fewer people walking along the banks of the river now, which was a good thing. Unless of course they were agents of the Royals in disguise, which would be a very bad thing indeed. But I was committed. There was nothing to do but follow through on my course of action.

It was easy enough to enter the grounds of the church. I simply hopped over the stone wall surrounding the place, which barely came to my waist. The wall wasn’t really meant to keep people out, though. After all, who would want to break into a church in the middle of the night?

A mist cloaked the gravestones as I walked through the grounds toward the church. I didn’t take that to be a good sign, as there hadn’t been a mist on the other side of the stone wall. As it turned out, I was right for once.

A light grew out of the mist near the church. Or rather, it was the opposite of light. It was a small black glow, darker than the night. It came toward me, bobbing up and down in the air around head level. It moved about the speed of a walking man, which made sense when the man walked out of the shadows to stand before me.

No, not a man. Not even close.

He had the body of a man, granted, but his skin was as black as a starless sky. He had the head of a jackal and it was equally as dark. I could barely make out his eyes studying me. He wore only a simple cloth on his waist and carried a staff in his hands. The staff was made of what looked like charred bone. It ended with an ankh on the top, and the ankh was made entirely of that strange black light.

“Hello, Anubis,” I said. “It’s been a while.”

Anubis. Once the Egyptian god of the dead. Now a faithful if not willing servant of the Royals, along with the rest of the Black Guard.

He said nothing in return. His nostrils flared, perhaps savouring my scent. His eyes gave away nothing. His pointed ears twitched a little.

“Where are the rest of the Black Guard?” I asked. “Don’t tell me my little trick in Elsinore actually managed to lure them all away from England?”

Anubis still didn’t say anything, but he never had been the talkative type. He walked in a slow circle around me and I let him have the moment. Why not? There was only one way this was going to end, after all.

He came to a stop in front of me again, and I saw more of that black light flickering across his skin. Tracing hieroglyphs that covered every inch of him, black upon black, like hidden tattoos. Then he lowered the staff and touched the strange ankh to the ground. The earth withered where the black light touched it, and lines of dead grass streaked away from us, deeper into the graveyard.

Then I heard sounds I knew too well. The noise of something or several somethings digging out of the earth. I knew the sounds because I’d made them myself enough times over the ages, when I’d woken buried under the ground. That was no comfort to me in this particular graveyard, though. Especially as I hadn’t brought any weapons with me.

I glanced around and saw the shapes rising from the graves surrounding me. I didn’t have to inspect them closely to see it was the dead pulling themselves from the earth. They looked like the dead tended to look after being left to rot for a time: they were mostly bone, but scraps of leathery flesh clung to them here and there, along with the disintegrating rags of clothing. There was even some clods of dirt in eye sockets and rib cages thrown in for good measure.

“I don’t imagine you raised Will for me as well, did you?” I asked, but Anubis just lifted the staff from the ground. That seemed to be the signal for the dead to take action, because they began to shuffle toward me then. It was hard to estimate their number because of the mist, but I put it at fifty or sixty. That I could see, anyway. Things were about to get interesting.

And then they got even more interesting. Another figure came out of the night, this time behind me. The figure in the black coat I’d glimpsed earlier in the day. He came the same way I’d come, tracing my steps through the graveyard. When one of the living dead turned to face him, he lashed out with a knife in his hand. The head fell from the dead body and rolled behind a grave marker. The newcomer pushed the body out of his way and kept coming. He pulled back the hood as he walked, so I could see his face.

Frankenstein.

“This is a pleasant surprise,” I said.

“Victor said that maybe you needed help,” he said. He gazed around the graveyard. “Victor is never wrong.”

Behind him, the headless body turned in our direction. So it was going to take more than that to kill them. I wasn’t surprised.

“And how did Victor know I’d come here?” I asked.

“We asked a few questions of the dead after your visit,” Frankenstein said, grinning a crooked smile. “We learned a little of your troubles. Victor says there are few places you could go to find the answers you seek.”

The dead—they were always talking. That’s why you had to be careful what you told them.

“Next time I’m just going to ask Victor what I should do,” I said. I turned back to Anubis. “Now you’re in trouble,” I said. “Why don’t you let me do what I came here for and I won’t tell the Royals what happened. It’ll be our little secret.”

Anubis looked at Frankenstein like he was trying to figure out what he was. Which was a waste of time. Frankenstein was Frankenstein, and that was all you needed to know about that.

“I don’t suppose you brought any more weapons?” I asked Frankenstein.

He smiled at me and opened his coat wide with both hands. The insides were lined with the tools from his room in the crematorium: scalpels and long knives and bone saws and picks and other things that don’t bear discussion in polite company.

I reached over and took a hatchet that looked as if it would be at home on a medieval battlefield. The solid weight of it felt reassuring in my hand—as reassuring as something can feel when surrounded by the risen dead while facing Anubis in a graveyard, anyway.

“All right,” I said, “let’s get on with it. If you’re not going to give me Shakespeare, we’ll just have to take him.”

That should have been the moment I attacked, but instead it was the cue for the dead to rush us. The circle of them collapsed in on us in a silent, shambling charge. There was none of the moaning and snarling you see in the movies. There was utter silence on the part of the dead. I guess they’d become good at being silent after all that time spent in the grave.

Frankenstein drew another long knife from his coat and then threw himself into the midst of them, both blades flashing. A skull dropped to the ground, along with the bony arm from a different one of the walking dead. It didn’t matter. They kept coming, as if they’d suffered no more than flesh wounds. That was the problem with fighting the dead. It was hard to kill them even more.

I turned and kicked the first one that Frankenstein had beheaded, straight in the rib cage. Bones shattered under my foot and the thing fell back amid the graves. The cracked ribs gave me some heart. The dead weren’t too supernatural then, if they could still break and be chopped apart.

I spun back to Anubis in time to turn his staff aside from my stomach with the hatchet. He thrust the staff like a spear, even though the end was just that glowing ankh. I suspected it had more uses than raising the dead.

I hacked at the staff but my hatchet merely bounced off of the bone without leaving a mark. That’s the way things go when you fight gods. Anubis spun the staff in his hands and struck at me several times, from several different directions. I burned some grace to give me the speed of an angel and dodged one blow, ducked under another, blocked one aimed at my head and then another at my feet, then danced backwards to avoid a diagonal slash across my body.

“Every time we meet this is what happens,” I said. “I really think we need to re-evaluate our relationship.”

Anubis didn’t press the attack. Instead, he stepped back to check on how his minions were doing. It would have been a good moment for me to strike, but it could have been a trap. Plus, I was curious about how things were going myself. So I stepped back and did the same, in time to see Frankenstein chop both arms off one of the dead in a double strike.

A half dozen or so dead surrounded him in various pieces. There was no obvious way to kill them, seeing as they were lacking organs or any other vital spots, so Frankenstein had settled for dismembering them. If there was anyone who was an expert at dismemberment, it was Frankenstein. He knew exactly where to strike and with how much force. I almost felt sorry for the dead, except that I didn’t think there was actually anybody home in any of those bodies.

I expanded my vision a little to check them out and saw nothing but the corpses. Normally, if I look hard enough I can see some sign of the souls trapped in the dead. But there was nothing in these dead.

No, that wasn’t quite true. There was something. That strange black light again. It flickered through the dead, running inside their bones. Anubis hadn’t raised the dead so much as he had animated them. I guess that particular ability was one of the perks of being a one-time god of the dead.

Anubis sprang into the air, striking down at my head with that staff. I dodged to the side and hacked at where I thought he’d be landing, but the blade cut through nothing. Anubis had twisted mid-leap and landed behind Frankenstein now. Unnatural agility was another benefit of being a former god. He rammed the staff into Frankenstein’s back before I could shout a warning, and the glowing ankh slid right into Frankenstein and disappeared.

The black glow expanded, spreading from Frankenstein’s back and racing up and down the length of his body. For a second, I worried that Anubis’s sneak attack would de-animate Frankenstein, the opposite of what he had done to the dead. Or even worse, it would place Frankenstein under Anubis’s control, just like the rest of the dead. Frankenstein was one of the few people in the world who I really didn’t want to fight.