The team crashed out into the courtyard. As they rattled towards the entry tunnel, Zalmyra opened her shutter just once to look out. Amid the carnage strewing the courtyard, she spotted the distinctive golden hair of Countess Trelawna, though it was now plastered across her shoulders and breasts as she sat cross-legged in the rain, cradling the form of a fallen knight. Another figure, the countess’s old nurse, crawled through the flood-waters.
“What’s happening?” Rufio gasped, too weak to open his own shutter.
“Nothing,” she said, closing out the light. But she seemed distracted. They rumbled into the entry tunnel; ahead, the drawbridge was already down. Abruptly, the duchess rapped on the ceiling. “Urgol! Stop!”
The vehicle slid to a halt, and shuddered as Urgol climbed from the bench. He opened the duchess’s door. “Mistress?”
“Go back,” she said. “Bring Countess Trelawna. She’s coming with us.”
Urgol nodded and clambered back to the roof to retrieve his iron-headed club.
Rufio looked up with an expression of almost absurd hopefulness.
“Don’t mistake me for a caring mother-in-law,” Zalmyra said. “I’ve no interest in your pretty little courtesan. It’s the brat she carries in her belly. Even if we didn’t need heirs, no grandchild of mine will be fed to the Old One.”
Rufio’s expression changed. “Grandchild?”
She sneered. “Somehow, your lack of knowledge makes you even more pathetic. You know why she never told you? Because she didn’t trust you to keep it secret. Her annulment is too precious to her.”
Rufio peered at her, baffled. And then, to her surprise, he cackled — as if genuinely amused. “Trelawna’s annulment is the only precious thing to her,” he finally said. “There’s no grandchild. She wouldn’t let me lie with her until we were lawfully married.”
“What?”
Now it was Rufio’s turn to sneer, though he also cringed with pain. “We lay together once, but many years ago.” His cackle became a full-throated laugh.
Outside, Urgol leapt down from the roof, club at his shoulder, and set off along the tunnel. At first, Zalmyra said nothing, although the look on her face was so terrifying that Rufio, had he not been sure he was dying, would have cowered from her.
“Urgoool!” she shrieked. The woodwose rushed back to her door. When she spoke again, her marble-white face had blanched to an even more bloodless hue. “Urgol… I’ve changed my mind. Go back there… and destroy the little slut who brought this destruction on us!”
Urgol nodded and strode away.
“No!” Rufio cried.
“Don’t be foolish,” his mother said as he tried to climb out. “She’s as good as dead anyway.”
“You vindictive bitch!” He gagged with pain as the cloak fell away, revealing a body drenched with gore. Slowly, fumbling, he managed to open the door.
“Then go and die,” Zalmyra said. “Those who defy the Malconi have earned their fate.”
“And the Malconi haven’t?” He grimaced as he put his feet on solid ground. “You who stand for nothing good?”
“Don’t be an imbecile. This is a minor setback. We will rise again.”
Rufio heaved himself to the ground. “I couldn’t… couldn’t wish for anything less.”
He stumbled away, and Zalmyra remained alone in the coach, absorbed in the bauble on her wand. The emerald fires inside it blazed. “In which case, my dear son, we must rise without you!”
High overhead, the thunder still raged and the lightning flashed. Below that, with no less savagery, Lucan fought with the facsimile of his father.
They smote at each other two-handed, dancing back and forth along the battlemented walk, a host of other ghouls watching in silence. Sparks flew as the hate-filled blades bickered, but Lucan was tired to his core. The ferocity of his father’s blows was more than he could endure. Even when, fleetingly, he spied an open guard, and drove through it, embedding his blade to eight inches in Duke Corneus’s chest, the fight continued. Black blood cascaded from the wound, but the demon was neither hurt nor weakened. Lucan tottered backward, and the monster laughed as it came on.
“Weakling!” it grated, showing long pegs of green teeth which even the real Corneus had never possessed. “You are ailing… I can… feel it. You are not fit… to unfurl… my black banner…”
“Once this is over, I will never unfurl it again,” Lucan retorted, counter-striking, slashing hard under his father’s guard, chopping through mail and flesh — so deeply that his blade lodged. Lucan tried to yank it loose but it would not shift. Still the duke was unhurt, and Lucan had to draw back unarmed.
Behind him now was nothing but a drop of thirty feet. More chill rain swept over him. Thunder drummed. Even if, by some miracle, he could dispose of this arch-abomination, another would follow, and another. There were more up here than he could count, and still more tentacles writhed along the battlements and groped up the outer wall, balls of clenched, foetal flesh unravelling at their tips.
Cruel laughter distracted him back to the vision of his father, slowly levering Heaven’s Messenger from his shoulder. With a scrape of bone and fresh gouts of black gore, he worked it loose — and examined it, seemingly amused that the pagan runes with which the blade had once been inscribed were scored away.
“And which god…” he wondered, “will save you now? The one you… defile each day… by your very… existence?”
Lucan backed to the battlements. The drop was perilous. He could not hope to survive it without at least shattering his limbs.
The apparition cast away its own sword, hefting Lucan’s instead. Rain slashed over the burned features, as the green teeth bared in a rictus grin. “Let me… test your faith… with… a Christian blade…”
It raised Heaven’s Messenger above its head. Lucan leapt forward, but the facsimile had been waiting for this, and greeted him with a forearm smash in the throat, knocking Lucan flat on his back. He lay stunned, helpless. Towering over him, the living ghost raised the blade on high for one mighty, butchering blow that would split him from cranium to crotch. Lucan tried to pray, but he no longer knew how. The apparition laughed again, and prepared to strike.
But the lightning struck first.
The jagged bolt tore down from the firmament in a blaze of blinding blue flame, finding the long steel blade held aloft. There was a detonation like the bursting of Heaven’s vault, and a glaring flash…
The pounding rain had washed Alaric’s lifeless body so clean that there was barely a drop of blood or speck of dirt left on him. As he lay in Trelawna’s arms, he looked as though he was merely sleeping. And now, almost as quickly as the downpour had begun, it started to abate.
Slowly, in a daze, the countess looked up.
A pearlescent blue sky was breaking through the ragged clouds. The hiss of falling rain slowly ceased, to be replaced by a trickling in the gutters and a dripping from the eaves — and by the approaching stump of heavy feet.
Trelawna saw Urgol advancing across the courtyard on foot.
His thick, hairy hide was wet and matted. For some reason it made him look less like an ape and more like a man, though still a gargantuan, brutish form. His fierce yellow eyes were locked on her; his sharp teeth showed through his snarling lips. When ten yards short, he produced his iron-headed club from behind his back.
“Lay your head on the paving stone, countess,” he grunted. “This can be so quick you won’t even know it has happened.”
Trelawna gazed mutely up at him, paralysed. Urgol shrugged, and in two strides was alongside her, his bludgeon raised.
And with a shriek, Gerta leapt onto him.