I cringed.
The alarkin laughed. When it did so, the butterflies all took flight. I smiled.
“I was so young. So intoxicated with power.” A breeze rose up, and I felt a shrug. “So long ago.”
I just nodded. Thunder rolled, distant and not threatening.
“It is done. You may return, now. Take care of Buttercup. She will be lost in your world without you and yours.”
I patted Buttercup’s hair. She yawned and rubbed her eyes wearily.
“We will. That’s a promise.”
“Good. Farewell, Finder. Trouble me no more. I shall return to my slumber, and my dreams.”
“Good night, Your Majesty,” I said. I’d never used such a title before without sarcasm. “And thanks.”
Buttercup went limp in my arms, fast asleep.
And then, without any fuss, we were back where we’d come from.
The House was gone. All of it, except the floor under our feet. The mighty slate and timber walls, the arching rooftops, the tiny windows, the red-painted door-gone.
Gone, but laid about us in every direction, in splinters and stones and heaps of smoking gravel.
Darla gasped. Mama shouted. Evis knocked me on my ass, sending Buttercup spilling and me scrambling and cursing.
They started diving and running and shouting at once. It didn’t last long, because the blast never came, the roof never fell, the walls never collapsed-there was nothing but silence and the odd wraithlike waft of drifting white smoke.
The trees had even been uprooted whole and cast aside, in a huge circle a couple of acres across, all around us.
House Werewilk was simply no more.
Darla caught my hand and hauled me to my feet and wrapped me up in a wordless hug. I could see and hear people beginning to talk, to turn around, to stare around them, eyes wide with wonder and confusion.
Only Mama Hog seemed unaffected by the sudden quiet.. She calmly stuffed her dried birds back in her bag and casually picked up a shiny silver spoon mixed in with the debris. “Reckon anybody wants this?” she said.
Evis laughed. Gertriss laughed. I think Darla and I did too, while Mama shrugged and dropped the spoon in her bag as well.
Milton Werewilk came ambling out of a cloud of fast-vanishing smoke. His hands were empty. He fought to hide a smile.
Somewhere in the distance, one of the monstrous uprooted trees came crashing back down to earth.
Singh appeared, scurrying out of the lawn, his clothes burned nearly off, blood running down his chest. Nevertheless, he managed to reach Milton’s side, and guide him toward us, leaning on his charge as he came.
Evis saw, turned toward me.
“I assume you struck a deal.”
“I got lucky,” I said. “But yes. We were spared.”
“You spoke to it?”
I nodded. “Less said the better.”
“Hisvin?”
“Alive, I think. Out there somewhere.”
Evis frowned. “Damn,” he said, quietly. “I was hoping maybe that little problem might have solved itself.”
“It’s not a problem anymore. Don’t ask. Just trust.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Nope.” Singh and Milton lurched up. I wondered if the Corpsemaster was in Milton’s body, or whether she’d hurried on home after the ruckus was done.
There was no animation in Milton’s eyes. But I knew that meant nothing. The Corpsemaster isn’t seen, unless she wants to be seen.
I shuddered.
“The Lady?” said Singh. “The others?”
“The tunnels,” I replied. I looked about the shattered House, realized we’d be better off trying to force open a door from the cornfield. “Scatter. Round up the ones that aren’t injured. We need to get your people out.”
“Sir?” He looked at me as if I sprouted wings. I realized he had no idea what he’d just been through, and he wasn’t dealing with the shock very well.
“Magic,” I said. “It was a spell. It’s done. Get a move on. Lank’s down there, somewhere.”
“Right, right.” He started shouting and yanking at elbows. I held Darla close and gave Gertriss a big wink. She caught Buttercup up and cradled the sleeping banshee in her arms.
Somebody found an intact shovel in the wreckage. Someone else found a steel pipe that would work as a pry-bar. I found my former bathtub, perched among the debris, undamaged, the towel I’d left folded on the rim still there.
I led everyone I could find toward the burned out cornfield, and we set about finding the hidden door while Milton drooled and stared.
We dug beneath a sky as nearly as blue as the alarkin’s. Crows circled warily overhead. If they came for a meal of corpses, they flapped away disappointed-not a single body lay anywhere. I imagined them all in the forest, shambling toward Rannit, eager to serve their dark new mistress, but I shoved that thought aside and put my back into turning up great spades of scorched earth.
We found them. Lady and Marlo and Lank and all, bruised and terrified and filthy, but alive, to the last.
It’s eight miles to the nearest other lonely House. The march took us the rest of the day and half the night. The Lady led her people in song until her voice gave out. Marlo can’t carry a tune and the man only knows one song, but by the Angels he finished the march.
And then we slept. Darla and I together, with Buttercup between us, Mama and Gertriss on the floor beside us.
I’ve never slept so soundly. If I dreamed at all, they were pleasant dreams, dreams I don’t remember.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Evis gets cigars shipped in from a place called Nash. They come stuffed in small, airtight wooden crates that are stuffed with bundles of damp moss that smell almost exactly like wet dog. Evis insists on unpacking them himself, and he always sends word to me so I can have one fresh out of the stinking grey-green moss.
Each crate holds fifty cigars and fifty pounds of moss. Unpacking is a nasty business. But the cigars themselves are pure rolls of Heaven.
We lit a pair, and Evis dimmed the lamps, and we watched the blue smoke circle around over Evis’s huge black desk.
Evis puffed and closed his eyes. “So. How did you know?”
“Know? Know what?”
“Know we’d survive down there with the alarkin. You did know, didn’t you? You didn’t open the door to some ancient bugaboo’s tomb on a guess. Tell me you didn’t.”
I shrugged. “They’d have just dug us out of the tunnels. Hisvin was losing. You know that.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
I thought about it. Mainly because I knew Darla would one day ask me the very same question.
“The paintings. That’s what decided it for me. You’ve seen them.” I took a long puff. “Nothing evil painted those. Nothing evil would even know how.”
“They’re brilliant. I agree on that. But they’re just paint. Could’ve been a ruse. What’s happened to you, Markhat? You used to be so marvelously cynical.”
“Still am. But look. If all it wanted was to get Buttercup down there, it could have done that without my help. It could have taken the Lady anytime it wanted.”
“It still could.”
“It won’t.”
Evis nodded, but didn’t open his eyes. “I hope you’re right. I really do. Learning there are things in this world scarier than the Corpsemaster is causing me to lose sleep.”
“Me too.”
“You haven’t asked once about the weapons that brought down Werewilk.” Evis leaned back in his chair and took in a long puff and let the smoke come hissing out between his mouthful of fangs.
“Wasn’t sure you wanted me to.” I don’t have fangs, despite what some will tell you, but I followed suit as best I could. “Still not sure I want to.”
Evis chuckled. “I’m going to tell you anyway.”
“Why? I’m not on the Avalante payroll.”
“The House wants the Corpsemaster to know exactly what nearly killed her,” said Evis. “And that’s when it gets complicated. They want her to know, but they don’t want to be the ones to tell her. Politics.”
My cigar was beginning to taste a bit harsh.