They appeared to have marched underwater across the floor of the moat and be coming straight up the wall by finding finger holds among the stones. The knights’ lamps made crazy patterns of light and shadow among the castle’s defenders and whatever was clambering up toward them.
I would have to wait to catch my breath. The thought flitted through my mind that Hildegarde would be very sorry to have missed all this.
“By the saints!” someone shouted. “It’s as though they’re directed by the devil himself!”
King Paul was in the middle of it all. I threw spell after spell onto the advancing warriors, raw terror lurking just beyond my shoulder. “Shall we make a sortie, Wizard?” the king asked me quietly.
“Magic’s stopping them,” I gasped. “Don’t try fighting them with steel-they look like they’d keep on fighting even with their heads cut off. Where’s the watchman?”
“That dark shape on the ground just inside the gate,” said Paul. “He’s not moving.”
I paused for a second to wipe my forehead and cautiously lowered the magical barrier I had thrown up around the first warriors through the gate. They were now all secured by binding spells. Several people rushed to examine the watchman.
“He’s dead!” said a knight in amazement. I was not amazed. If the watchman had not blown his horn with his final breath, if I had been only a few seconds slower getting to the gate, there would have been a whole lot more people dead by now. Yurt had always been a very peaceful kingdom. It looked like it wasn’t anymore.
IV
It took me half an hour to get all the warriors, both inside and outside the walls, immobilized with magic. We lowered the drawbridge again, and knights carried the ones who had made it into the courtyard back outside. They used grappling hooks to retrieve the rest from the moat; being under water had not taken the light from the creatures’ eyes. The swans from the moat had all retreated to dry land, hissing and flapping their wings menacingly if anyone came near.
Though the knights tried to pry the swords from the warriors’ grips, they held on far too tightly, even encased in my binding spells. I didn’t count, but there must have been at least a hundred of them. Whatever they were, I thought, studying them by lamplight with fists on my hips, they weren’t human. Human in shape, holding swords in human hands, they had no minds inside their heads or souls behind their eyes. The sweat on me was cold now that I had finished my spells, but it was more than that that made me shiver.
“Demons incarnate!” gasped the chaplain, clutching his crucifix. He took a quick look and then retreated. The whole castle was roused and milling around the courtyard-everyone, that is, except the Lady Justinia, whom no one had seen.
“Not demons,” I said slowly. Several lay on the ground by my feet, no longer struggling against my spells but watching me with glowing eyes. “Demons would not have been stopped by my spells. But they’re not alive either. They look like they’re made from hair and bone.”
“Can magic do that?” asked the chaplain, hovering a short distance behind me as though not wanting to approach but not wanting to appear to retreat any further either. “Can it make life?”
“Not life. But there are spells in the old magic of earth and stone that can give the semblance of life. They don’t teach those spells at the wizards’ school, but back in the old days of apprenticeships wizards used to learn them, and I think they still use them over in the Eastern Kingdoms, beyond the mountains.”
“How would you make such creatures?” asked the chaplain, coming one step closer and sounding interested in spite of himself.
“The traditional way,” I said, then paused for a second to renew a binding spell that seemed tattered, “was to use dragon’s teeth.”
There was a long silence. “You didn’t make them, did you?” asked the chaplain as though trying to make a joke. When I turned to glare at him, in no mood for a joke, he added hastily, “Well, I trust you did not, my son, but in that case who did?”
“I have absolutely no idea.” It must be linked with the Lady Justinia’s arrival, I thought, but I was not about to say so until I had better evidence-no use having everyone in the castle treating with suspicion someone whom the mage had entrusted to me.
Then I remembered who else had been entrusted to me. Antonia! Where was she in all this? Yelling at one of the knights to call me the second any of these unliving warriors showed signs of breaking out of my spells, I raced back into the castle and to my chambers.
She had lit the magic lamp and was sitting in my best chair with a blanket wrapped around her. “What happened?” she asked, round-eyed. “And why,” with a wrinkling of her chin as though trying to keep back tears of terror, “did you leave me all alone?”
I snatched her up and held her close. “I’m so sorry, Antonia,” I murmured, stroking her hair. She was shaking and clung to me-no cool self-possession now. “But right here was the safest place for you. Some warriors tried to invade the castle, and I had to stop them.”
Slowly she stopped shaking as I held her. “I could have helped you,” she said then, pushing herself back to look me in the face. “I can do all sorts of spells. While I was waiting for you I turned Dolly into a frog.”
A quick glance at her doll showed it unchanged: a rag doll, embroidered with a smiling face I found almost aggressively adorable, wearing a silk dress doubtless made from the scraps of something Theodora had sewn for a fine lady of Caelrhon. “Soon you’ll be a witch like your mother,” I said encouragingly.
For some reason I didn’t like the way that sounded, but we were interrupted by a shout from the courtyard. “Wizard!”
I bounced Antonia back into bed. “Go to sleep,” I said, trying not to sound too rough. “I may be busy the rest of the night.” And I darted out across the drawbridge to find one of the armored warriors pushing itself to a sitting position and raising its sword.
A few quick words of the Hidden Language restored the binding spell, but I thought, looking at the twitching collection of creatures before me, that there was a limit to how long I could keep them imprisoned. I had worked my spells fast, using shortcuts wherever I could, and the spells that made unliving hair and bones-and maybe dragons’ teeth-into manlike shapes were a lot stronger than mine. It would only be a matter of time until they all broke free again unless I found a way to dismantle them.
And I couldn’t do that and keep my binding spells going at the same time. I needed help.
“Do we have enough chains to chain them up?” I asked King Paul. Brute force might supplement magic in the short term. He took some of the knights to look while I hurried up and down the rows between the creatures, renewing spells and blinking in the lamplight as exhaustion pricked the backs of my eyes. But I could not let up my concentration for even a second. Warriors with swords in their unliving hands could have slashed me in two before I even realized my spells were weakening.
The king managed to persuade everyone but the knights to go back inside once they realized the immediate excitement was over. The chaplain, showing a calm authority I had not expected in him, took away the body of the watchman for last rites. By the time we had the warriors all chained together-and twice a knight of Yurt just missed being badly wounded while he tried to fasten links around a creature that had almost managed to wiggle free of my binding spell-dawn had streaked the eastern sky pink. Not too early, I thought, to make a phone call.
There was only one person worth calling. I gave the glass telephone the magical coordinates of Elerius’s castle.
It took several minutes before the wizards’ school’s best graduate appeared in the phone’s glass base. While I waited for him I tried to think how to frame my request for help so it wouldn’t sound as desperate as I felt. Elerius, though school-trained, had years ago also learned enough of the old magic from a renegade magician who had been hiding out high in the eastern mountains that he himself could give dead bones the semblance of life. I probably could have too, given enough time, but Elerius’s skills were so unusual that he had even been invited to give a series of lectures on the topic at the school.