“I’m not hiding in any steel bowl,” said Darla.
“Me neither,” said Mama, loosing another savage kick at the smoldering remains of the Elf. “Might take me one of them fancy guns, though. I aims to do some harm.”
Buttercup looked up at me and grinned.
“Hell with it then,” I said. “Mama, I’ll get you a rifle. Buttercup too, maybe even a brace of cannon.”
Mama cussed and grabbed the little banshee and hauled her out of the kitchen. Darla and I kissed, checked our pistols, cleaned chicken broth off Toadsticker’s noble steel, and set about arming the survivors and warning them not to fire too soon or at each other.
Chapter Fifteen
The bone-men stood in clacking rows halfway to the stage.
Stitches fussed with the rotary guns, banging away at some brass mechanism with a hammer in a most unsorcerous fashion. A hundred halfdead ringed the advancing line of skeletons, rifles ready. Behind the riflemen stood more halfdead, each holding a fresh weapon and kneeling by a crate of ammunition.
The bone-men advanced another step, coming even with a chalk line inscribed on the floor.
The riflemen fired, working their bolts until their weapons were empty. Then they dropped them, grabbed the fresh ones handed to them by their reloaders, and started firing anew.
The bone-men fell in scores. The smoke from the rifles filled the ruined casino with a thick and choking fog. Lady Rondalee still held the stage, her voice a dry croak, but her words still sounding.
I counted a dozen dancers limp and pale, still moving though dead or nearly so. Evis and Gertriss still held their heads upright, still showed signs of life in their movements.
“What about them?” said Darla, tearing her eyes away from Gertriss and Evis.
“When the shadow gate closes, the music box will be inside. They’ll stop dancing. You’ll see.”
“You’re makin’ that up, boy. Though it does make a kind of sense.”
“With any luck, as soon as we close the shadow, the music box will start making those damned things in the shadow dance.” I had a brief vision of the monstrous, shambling hulks I’d seen in that place, locked forever in some clumsy round of pirouettes twenty stories tall.
That’s what you get for hurting my friends, I thought. Dance ’til Doomsday, you bastards.
Mama stomped hard on my foot.
“What the hell was that for?”
“Sorry, boy, you got a funny look all the sudden. All glazed over like. Thought you was about to start dancing with them others.”
“Smoke got in my eyes. Save it for Hag Mary, Mama.”
Another wave of skeletons poured out of the gap in the Queen’s hull. This time, though, something came with them.
I used to fish the Brown, like every other poor kid in the city. We’d sneak into the big lumber yards and dig at the edges of the mountains of sawdust. There we’d find enormous, fat nightcrawler worms, perfect for catching Brown River catfish.
This was like those nightcrawler worms, only as big around as I was tall. It glistened, and its segmented, oily body heaved and pulsed. It knocked bone-men aside and ground them into splinters as it struggled to push its bulk toward us.
Stitches gave the rotary gun a final savage blow and brought it to bear, cranking it with her pale, thin arm. It erupted in gunfire, and the rounds slammed full into the eyeless face of the worm.
The worm raised up, its end splitting into a wet opening lined with spikes. It howled as the rounds sank in. Thin, black blood spewed with each impact. It made a deep, gurgling roar and surged forward, rising higher, towering above Stitches.
A halfdead leaped to the other gun and began cranking and firing. He stitched a line of wounds across its neck. Black blood splashed and flew, but the creature kept coming.
Stitches backed away from her gun. A halfdead leaped to her place. She lifted her hands, filled them with light, and hurled an infant sun toward the worm.
The Queen shook, her deck heaving as the thing slammed its bulk down and then-flames coursing from its maw-it began to flail wildly about, striking the deck again, the ceiling, the walls. The guns followed it as best they could, sending wood chips flying and probably carving fist-sized holes in the deck and the hull.
Skeletons swarmed about, nearly lost in the smoke and the dark. All but one of the massive hanging lights were extinguished by the worm’s death throes, leaving us all half-blind.
A grinning skeleton gave itself away by clacking its teeth. I shattered its skull with a wild shot, and saw other, furtive scurryings in the smoke.
“Stitches, it’s time!” I yelled. Darla took down another bone-man a few yards away. Mama threw a chair at a pair of bony knees and brought her boot down on its skull when it fell. The bone-men managed to send at least a dozen of their fellows past the last chalk line.
Stitches climbed atop a felt-covered card table. Halfdead gathered in a ring around her, swords and rifles at the ready.
Stitches raised her glass staff, and a blinding spark of light grew within it.
“Mama, keep a hand on Buttercup. Darla, stay close. Let’s go.”
I led them out through the doors. Out of the choking gun-smoke and the stink of the worm thing’s dark blood. Out onto the Queen’s porched decks, where lines of nervous faces kept watch on the dark.
“Be ready, people,” I shouted. “Don’t be in a hurry. Don’t shoot your neighbors. Don’t jump in the river unless you can swim.”
All was quiet for a moment. Muddy water rushed past. Above, there was moonless night, the usual stars, a distant river-bank lined with the tall, black boughs of deep forest.
Mama rested the barrel of her rifle on the rail. “Boy, how do I shoot this contraption, again? Pull this?”
Before I could warn her, she tugged at the trigger, and the rifle jumped and barked.
Night gave way briefly to day. The primal father of all thunder cracked the sky and sounded across the river.
“Damn, boy,” said Mama in hushed tones of awe.
Half a dozen other shots rang out. I cussed and yelled for them to cease firing, all the while blinking and straining to see beyond the rail.
The brief flash had rendered us all half-blind. I finally got them to stop firing about the time I could see again.
The river hadn’t changed. Neither had the sky or the trees.
A ragged cheer rose up. Shouts began to sound from below decks. A door opened, and a pair of Ogres poured out, clubs held at the ready, hooting questions none of us could answer.
The Queen shuddered. Her wheel picked up speed and her rudders bit hard. We turned to port, which I prayed was the closest patch of dry, solid ground.
Stitches emerged from the Queen’s interior. Gunshots still rang out from within, though they were rifle shots-not the thunder of the rotary guns.
We melted the barrels, she said. Some number rushed through. But the shadow is gone.
“Evis and the rest?”
No change. Yet. But take heart. The residual effects…
She just stopped talking. She threw back her hood and pointed toward the horizon.
Figures walked there, dark silhouettes like the trees, but moving and towering above them.
There was a man, in old-style armor, with horns on his helmet.
There was a tall, thin man bearing a staff.
Between them was a crone, hunched and bent, her hair as wild as Mama’s, her nails grown long and twisted.
“Damn damn damn,” said Mama. She wrestled with her gun, managed to jam it by pulling back the bolt without firing first. “I can’t swim, boy. But I reckon I might try anyways.”
The dark giants walked. Trees snapped and broke beneath their feet. Flocks of panicked birds rose up, wheeling away against the starry sky.