“They go nuts too?”
Evis shook his head. “Hardly. They nailed the door shut without opening it. They knew dead when they saw it.”
“Bright lads.”
Evis nodded. “What do you think would happen if I laid this rifle barrel right against that music box and pulled the trigger?”
“Not a damned thing.”
Evis sighed. “I hate it when you’re right, Markhat. Didn’t scratch the thing. Got any ideas?”
“One crisis at a time.” I gestured toward the shadow. “What about putting a dozen of your men in a half circle around that with their backs to it? To keep people from wandering too close?”
He barked orders. Halfdead took their places, horror at their backs. If any of them were fearful they didn’t let it show.
One drunk wobbled up, shouting to someone only he could see and trying to sidle past. He got a rifle butt to his face for his trouble. A waiter grabbed him by one leg and dragged him off to safety.
I caught Darla staring at the shadowed place again. “No,” she said before I could ask the question. “I’m not looking into it. Just at it. And honey, I believe it’s getting larger, by the minute.”
Evis glanced at Stitches. “Is it?”
Stitches aimed her glass staff that way. The metal vanes whirled.
Yes. Its boundaries are moving. I may be able to slow it down. But I cannot halt its expansion entirely.
A bony hand emerged from the dark, groping blindly about. Another joined it, grasping at empty air with fingers that dropped flakes of desiccated flesh.
Stitches hurled a sizzling arc of crackling light full into the shadow, right over the heads of the Avalante soldiers. The skeletal hands withdrew but the darkness remained.
One of Evis’s halfdead soldiers broke from his post about the shadow, walking jerkily toward us, as though injured or ill. His rifle fell from his grasp as he drew near.
“Damn,” said Mama. “Didn’t think I’d see no halfdead get called to dance.”
Evis opened his mouth to protest, but the halfdead brushed past us, his dead eyes wide and dry, his mouth open as if trying to speak.
He took his place amid the other dancers, and began to spin and turn.
“That isn’t possible,” said Evis.
I beg to differ. Stitches stared, eyes moving back and forth like those of a dreamer, behind her tight-sewn eyelids.
The capture of dancers is increasing in frequency, at a rate that appears commensurate with the expansion of the shadow.
“So we can either be grabbed by whatever is in the dark, or be forced to dance until our legs wear down to stumps, is that it?”
Not entirely. That which lies beyond the shadow is beginning to emerge. In doing so, it is inducing small but fundamental changes to the nature of reality within the Queen’s shield.
“The air feels funny,” agreed Mama with a frown. “So somethin’ is aimin’ to choke us out?”
It appears so. If I am correct, the changes exerted by the shadow will soon render our reality compatible with that which lies beyond.
“Which lets them just stroll out and snack on the dancers,” I said.
Stitches nodded. Unless I collapse the shield.
“Doing that leaves us open to an ambush by Hag Mary and her pals,” said Evis. “Someone has thought of everything.”
A new pair of skeletal hands appeared from the growing shadow. Evis barked a command, and his ring of foot soldiers turned and fired.
Finger-bones shattered and flew.
Something in the dark howled with laughter.
A door slammed. I heard shouts, arguing, a man’s voiced, raised and furious, and a woman’s, soft but stern.
Lady Rondalee herself took the stage.
“The band can’t stop playing,” she said to Evis. “Am I right that those folks can’t stop dancing?”
Evis nodded. “You should get to your room,” he said. “It isn’t safe here.”
Lady Rondalee laughed. “Child, it’s not safe anywhere on the Brown River tonight. But I was hired to sing and sing I shall. Maybe I can do some good that way. Ease these poor souls’ pain.”
Evis frowned. Mama spoke before he could.
“I reckon we all best be doin’ whatever we can, and no mistake,” she said. “If’n you knows the risk.”
“All too well.” The Lady Rondalee smiled down at Mama. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Hog.”
“Likewise, Lady of Bel Loit.”
And the Lady Rondalee began to sing.
She didn’t have music. The musicians were playing, all right, in that their hands were moving and they were making noise, but it was just noise now-tooting and twanging and discordant strumming.
The Lady Rondalee didn’t need music. She carried her own deep down in her voice, and when she sang the dancers slowed and the musicians slumped, panting and sweating, but able to steal just a moment of precious rest.
Evis gave orders. In a moment, the recorded music began to play, and the Lady used it, her voice soaring and soothing with the foreign, melancholy tune.
“She’s buyin’ us some time,” said Mama, glaring at the music box. From the look on her face, I could tell she was weighing the risk of taking one last spiteful swipe at it. “We’d best be about puttin’ it to good use.”
Darla dodged out of the way of a new dancer. “Mama, how is she doing that? Slowing them down, I mean?”
“Don’t know. They got their own magic, down Bel Loit way. I’ve heard the name Rondalee. They say she can sing up hexes like nobody’s business.”
On stage, the Lady Rondalee must have heard, because she bowed and smiled, never missing a beat.
I hauled Darla away from the weary dancers and back to our makeshift cauldron, Mama and Evis and Stitches in tow.
Armed halfdead prowled the deserted casino. More skeletal arms began to emerge from the dark. Evis forbade his men from wasting ammunition by firing on them. He held a quick conference with a trio of black-shirted day folk, and they hurried toward the main doors and out into the night.
“Let’s get this done,” said Evis, glaring at our boiling stew pot. “Stitches, Mama, how much longer?”
Another hour, perhaps an hour and ten.
Mama dropped to her haunches and started poking at her pile of trinkets and herbs. “‘Bout the same, I reckon.”
Another vacant-eyed reveler raised a ruckus by tangling with the halfdead trying to keep people away from the stricken dancers. The new dancer broke free and started twirling while the halfdead watched helplessly.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “What if I throw yonder music box into the shadow?”
“How you reckon on movin’ it at all?” Mama shook her shaggy head. “I tell ye, boy, it might as well be bolted to the floor.”
“Mama. That rope that got you here. Still got it?”
Mama nodded. “Right here in my sack.” She wanted to ask me what made me think a banshee-hair rope would be able to pull the music box when she couldn’t budge it, but she was wise enough not to ask it aloud.
I was glad. Because I didn’t have an answer. For all I knew a rope woven with Buttercup’s golden locks wouldn’t do a damned thing against a magical item of such potency, but then again I doubted even a summer-born Elf suspected a banshee was nearby.
“I need it, if it’s handy.”
“If it please ye.” Mama rummaged in her burlap sack, withdrew a number of ragged dried birds, and finally produced a tangle of what I first took for twine.
She pitched it to me.
“You call this a rope?” It was as thick as a pencil and already beginning to unravel here and there.
“At two pence a foot, you’re damn right I call it a rope,” said Mama. “I weren’t aimin’ to pull no millstones.”
I sat and started untangling the mess. Mama went back to her piles, muttering all the while.
“Angels and horses,” said Evis, lifting his weapon. “Stitches, can you spare a moment?”
The darkness on the wall disgorged a human skeleton-whole, complete, and animated. It bore a long, curved sword, and managed to take half a dozen tentative steps toward the nearest of the Avalante guards before an invisible barrier halted its advance.