Carpe Jugulum (26 page)

Blood tinted the rain that ran off the wound on Jason Ogg’s shoulder. He dabbed at it with a cloth.

“Reckon I’ll be hammerin’ left-handed for a week or two,” he said, wincing.

“They got very good fields of fire,” said Shawn, who had taken refuge behind the beer barrel used so recently to wet the baby’s head. “I mean, it’s a
castle
. A frontal attack simply won’t work.”

He sighed, and shielded his guttering candle to keep the wind from blowing it out. They’re tried a frontal attack nevertheless, and the only reason no one had been killed was that the drink seemed to be flowing freely within the keep. As it was, one or two people would be limping for a while. Then they’d tried what Jason persisted in referring to as a backal attack, but there were arrow slots even over the kitchens. One man creeping up to the walls very slowly—a sidle attack, as Shawn had thought of it—had worked, but since all the doors were very solidly barred this had just meant that he’d stood there feeling like a fool.

He was trying to find some help in the ancient military journals of General Tacticus, whose intelligent campaigning had been so successful that he’d lent his very name to the detailed prosecution of martial endeavor, and had actually found a section headed What to Do If One Army Occupies a Well-fortified and Superior Ground and the Other Does Not, but since the first sentence read “Endeavor to be the one inside” he’d rather lost heart.

The rest of the Lancre militia cowered behind buttresses and upturned carts, waiting for him to lead them.

There was a respectful clang as Big Jim Beef, who was acting as cover for two other part-time soldiers, saluted his commander.

“I reckon,” he ventured, “dat it we got big fire’s goin’ in frun’ of the doors we could smoke dem out.”

“Good idea,” said Jason.

“That’s the
King’s
door,” Shawn protested. “He’s already been a bit sharp with me for not cleaning the privy pit this week—”

“He can send Mum the bill.”

“That’s seditious talk, Jason! I could have you arr—I could arr—Mum would have something to say about you talking like that!”

“Where is the King, anyway?” said Darren Ogg. “Sittin’ back and lettin’ Mum sort everything out while we get shot at?”

“You know he’s got a weak chest,” said Shawn. “He does very well considering he—”

He stopped as a sound rolled out across the countryside. It had a hoarse, primal quality, the sound of an animal who is in pain but who also intends to pass it on as soon as possible. The men looked around nervously.

Verence came thundering through the gates. Shawn recognized him only by the embroidery on his nightshirt and his fluffy slippers. He held a long sword over his head in both hands and was running straight for the door of the keep, trailing a scream behind him.

The sword struck the wood. Shawn heard the whole door shudder.

“He’s gone mad!” shouted Darren. “Let’s grab the poor creature before he gets shot!”

A couple of them scurried across to the struggling King, who was standing horizontally on the door in an effort to get the sword out.

“Now, see here, your maj—Aargh!”

“Ach, tak a faceful o’heid!”

Darren staggered back, clutching at his face.

Little shapes swarmed across the courtyard after the King, like some kind of plague.

“Gibbins!”

“Fackle!”

“Nac mac Feegle!”

There was another scream as Jason, trying to restrain his monarch’s enthusiasm, found that while the touch of a monarch may indeed cure certain scalp conditions, the scalp of a king itself is capable of spreading someone’s nose into an interesting flat shape.

Arrows thudded into the ground around them.

Shawn grabbed Big Jim. “They’re all going to get shot, drink or not!” he shouted above the din. “You come with me!”

“What we gonna do?”

“Clean the privies!”

The troll scuttled after him as he edged his way around the keep, to where the Gong Tower loomed against the night in all its odiferous splendor. It was the bane of Shawn’s life. All the keep’s garderobes discharged into it. One of his jobs was to clean it out and take the contents to the pits in the gardens where Verence’s efforts at composting were gradually turning them into, well, Lancre.
*
But now that the castle was a lot busier than it used to be his weekly efforts with shovel and wheelbarrow weren’t the peaceful and solitary interludes they had been. Of
course
he’d let the job sort of…pile up these last few weeks, but did they expect him to do
everything
?

He waved Big Jim toward the door at the bottom of the tower. Fortunately, trolls have not much interest in organic odors, although they can easily distinguish types of limestone by smell.

“I want you to open it when I say,” he said, tearing a strip off his shirt and wrapping it around an arrow. He searched his pockets for a match. “And when you’ve opened the door,” he went on, as the cloth caught, “I want you to run away very, very fast, right? Okay…open the door!”

Big Jim pulled at the handle. There was a very faint whoosh as the door swung back.

“Run!” Shawn shouted. He drew back the bowstring, and fired through the doorway.

The flaming arrow vanished into the noisome darkness. There was a pause of a few heartbeats. Then the tower exploded.

It happened quite slowly. The green-blue light mushroomed up from story to story in an almost leisurely way, blowing out stones at every level to give the tower a nice sparkling effect. The roofing leads opened up like a daisy. A faint flame speared the clouds. Then time, sound and motion came back with a
thump.

After a few seconds the main doors burst open and the soldiers ran out. The first one was smacked between the eyes by a ballistic king.

Shawn had just started to run back to the fight when someone landed on his shoulders, bearing him to the ground.

“Well, well, one of the toy soldiers,” sneered Corporal Svitz, leaping up and drawing his sword.

As he raised it Shawn rolled and struck upward with the Lancrastian Peace-time Army Knife. He might have had time to select the Device for DFissecting Paradoxes, or the Appli-ance for Detecting Small Grains of Hope, or the Spiral Thing for Ascertaining the Reality of Being, but as it happened it was the Instrument for Ending Arguments Very Quickly that won the day.

Presently, there came a short sharp shower of soft rain.

Well…certainly a shower.

Definitely soft, anyway.

Agnes hadn’t seen a mob like this before. Mobs, in her limited experience, were noisy. This one was silent. Most of the town was in it, and to Agnes’s surprise they’d brought along many of the children.

It didn’t surprise Perdita.
They’re going to kill the vampires
, she said,
and the children will watch.

Good, thought Agnes, that’s exactly right.

Perdita was horrified.
It’ll give them nightmares!

No, thought Agnes. It’ll take the nightmares away. Sometimes, everyone has to know the monster is dead, and remember, so that they can tell their grandchildren.

“They tried to turn people into things,” she said aloud.

“Sorry, miss?” said Piotr.

“Oh…just thinking aloud.”

And where had she got that other idea, Perdita wondered, the one where she’d told the villagers to send runners out to other towns to report on the night’s work. That was unusually nasty of her.

But she remembered the look of horror on the mayor’s face, and, later, the blank engrossed expression when he was trying to throttle the Count with his chain of office. The vampire had killed him with a blow that had almost broken him in half.

She fingered the wounds on her neck. She was pretty certain vampires didn’t miss, but Vlad must have done, because she clearly
wasn’t
a vampire. She didn’t even like the idea of rare steak. She’d tried to see if she could fly, when she thought people weren’t looking, but she was as attractive to gravity as ever. The blood-sucking…no, never that, even if it was the ultimate diet program, but she’d have liked the flying.

It’s changed you,
said Perdita.

“How?”

“Sorry, miss?”

You’re sharper…edgier…nastier.

“Maybe it’s about time I was, then.”

“Sorry, miss?”

“Oh, nothing. Do you have a spare sickle?”

The vampires traveled fast but erratically, appearing not so much to fly as to be promising entries in the world long-jump championships.

“We’ll burn that
ungrateful
place to the ground,” moaned the Countess, landing heavily.

“
Afterward
we’ll burn that place to the ground,” said Lacrimosa. “This is what kindness leads to, Father, I do hope you’re paying attention?”

“After you paid for that bell tower, too,” said the Countess.

The Count rubbed his throat, where the links of the gold chain still showed as a red weal. He wouldn’t have believed that a human could be so strong.

“Yes, that might be a good course of action,” he said. “We would have to make sure the news got around, of course.”

“You think
this
news won’t get around?” said Lacrimosa, landing beside him.

“It will be dawn soon, Lacci,” said the Count, with heavy patience. “Because of my training, you will regard it as rather a nuisance, not a reason to crumble into a little pile of dust. Reflect on this.”

“That Weatherwax woman did this, didn’t she,” said Lacri-mosa, ignoring this call to count her blessings. “She put her self somewhere and she’s attacking us. She can’t be in the baby. I suppose she wasn’t in your fat girl, Vlad? Plenty of room in there. Are you listening, Brother?”

“What?” said Vlad, distantly, as they turned a corner in the road and saw the castle ahead of them.

“I saw you give in and bite her. So romantic. They still dragged her off, though. They’ll have to use quite a long stake to hit any useful organ.”

“She’d have put her self somewhere close,” said the Count. “It stands to reason. It must’ve been someone in the hall…”

“One of the other witches, surely,” said the Countess.

“I wonder…”

“That stupid priest,” said Lacrimosa.

“That would probably appeal to her,” said the Count. “But I suspect not.”

“Not…Igor?” said his daughter.

“I wouldn’t give that a moment’s thought,” said the Count.

“I still think it was Fat Agnes.”

“She wasn’t that fat,” said Vlad sulkily.

“You’d have got tired of her in the end and we’d have ended up with her always getting in the way, just the others,” said Lacrimosa. “
Traditionally
a keepsake is meant to be a lock of their hair, not their entire skull—”

“She’s different.”

“Just because you can’t read her mind? How interesting would that be?”

“At least I did
bite
someone,” said Vlad. “What was wrong with you?”

“Yes, you were acting very strangely, Lacci,” said the Count, as they reached the drawbridge.

“If she was hiding in
me
I’d know!” snarled Lacrimosa.

“I wonder if you would,” said the Count. “She just has to find a weak spot…”

“She’s just a witch, Father. Honestly, we’re acting as though she’s got some sort of terrible power—”

“Perhaps it was Vlad’s Agnes after all,” said the Count. He gave his son a slightly longer stare than was strictly necessary.

“We’re nearly at the castle,” said the Countess, trying to rally them. “We’ll all feel better for an early day.”

“Our best coffins got taken to Lancre,” said Lacrimosa sullenly. “
Someone
was so sure of themselves.”

“Don’t you adopt that tone with me, young woman!” said the Count.

“I’m two hundred years old,” said Lacrimosa. “Pardon me, but I think I can choose any tone I like.”

“That’s no way to speak to your father!”

“Really, Mother, you might at least act as if you had two brain cells of your own!”

“It is
not
your father’s fault that everything’s gone wrong!”

“It has
not
all gone wrong, my dear! This is just a temporary setback!”

“It won’t be when the Escrow meat tell their friends! Come on, Vlad, stop moping and back me up here…”

“If they tell them, what can they do? Oh, there will be a little bit of protesting, but then the survivors will see reason,” said the Count. “In the meantime, we have those witches waiting for us. With the baby.”

“And we’ve got to be polite to them, I suppose?”

“Oh, I don’t think we need to go that far,” said the Count. “Let them live, perhaps—”

Something bounced on the bridge beside him. He reached down to pick it up, and dropped it with a yelp.

“But…garlic shouldn’t burn…” he began.

“Thith ith water from the Holy Turtle Pond of Thquintth,”
said a voice above them. “Blethed by the Bithop himthelf in the Year of the Trout.” There was a glugging noise and the sound of someone swallowing. “That wath a good year for beatitude,” Igor went on. “But you don’t have to take
my
word for it. Duck, you thuckerth!”

The vampires dived for cover as the bottle, turning over and over, arced down from the battlements.

It shattered on the bridge, and most of the contents hit a vampire, who burst into flame as if hit by burning oil.

“Now
really
, Cryptopher, there’s no call for that sort of thing,” said the Count, as the blazing figure screamed and spun around in a circle. “It’s all in your mind, you know. Positive thinking, that’s the ticket…”

“He’s turning black,” said the Countess. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

“Oh, very well. Vlad, just kick him off the drawbridge, will you?”

The luckless Cryptopher was pushed, squirming, into the chasm.

“You know, that should not have happened,” said the Count, looking at his blistered fingers. “He obviously was not…truly one of us.” Far below, there was a splash.

The rest of the vampires scrambled for the cover of the gate arch as another bottle exploded near the Count. A drop splashed his leg, and he glanced down at the little wisp of smoke.

“Some error appears to have crept in,” he said.

“I’ve never been one to put myself forward,” said the Countess, “but I strongly suggest you find a
new
plan, dear. One which works, perhaps?”

“I have one already formed,” he said, tapping his knuckles against the huge oak gates. “If everyone would perhaps stand aside…”

Up on the battlement Igor nudged Nanny Ogg, who lowered a decanter of water from the Holy Fountain of Seven-Handed Sek and followed his pointing thumb.
*

Clouds were suddenly spiraling, with blue light flashing inside them.

“There’th going to be a thtorm!” he said. “The top of my head’th tingling! Run!”

They reached the tower just as a single bolt of lightning blew the doors apart and shattered the stones where they had been standing.

“Well,
that
was easy,” said Nanny, lying full length on the floor.

“They can control the weather,” said Igor.

“Blast!” said Nanny. “That’s right. Everyone knows that, who knows anything about vampires.”

“Thorry. But they won’t be able to try that on the inthide doorth. Come on!”

“What’s that smell?” said Nanny, sniffing. “Igor, your boots are on fire!”

“Damn! And thethe feet were nearly new thicth montth ago,” said Igor, as Nanny’s holy water sizzled over the smoking leather. “It’th my wire, it pickth up thtray currentth.”

“What happened, someone was hit by a falling buffalo?” said Nanny, as they hurried down the stairs.

“It wath a tree,” said Igor reproachfully. “Mikhail Thwenitth up at the logging camp, the poor man. Practically nothing left, but hith parentth thaid I could have hith feet to remember him by.”

“That was strangely kind of them.”

“Well, I gave him a thpare arm after the acthe acthident a few yearth ago and when old Mr. Thwenitth’th liver gave out I let him have the one Mr. Kochak left to me for giving Mithith Kochak a new eye.”

“People round here don’t so much die as pass on,” said Nanny.

“What goeth around cometh around,” said Igor.