The Call (The Magnificent 12 1)

Each of the Magnifica had his or her own areas of greatest strength. Each had mastered one of the Twelve Pairs of Potentiality. Grimluk’s greatest strength was in the Birds and Animals pair. He had summoned hundreds of creatures to the battle. And many brave hawks, lions, stags, bats, wild boars, and snakes had died.

But Grimluk also had lesser abilities in Darkness and Light, and even in Calm and Storm—though that was Miladew’s area of true genius.

When it was done, the Magnificent Twelve were the Magnificent Eight. Four of them had died fighting.

But the Pale Queen, at last worn down and defeated, lay pulsating, helpless, bound by spells and ropes and chains and heaped all around with the driest tinder and trusted men with torches.

The battle had been long and bloody and horrible beyond belief. It had aged Grimluk. He was no longer a young man with clear skin and firm muscles. There were lines in his face, aches in his body, a physical weakness that sometimes made breathing itself seem like labor. Worse still was the shadow that would forever darken his soul.

The castle walls had been shattered. Great chunks of wall lay scattered across the landscape. Bodies lay everywhere—on the walls, and crushed beneath remnants of the walls.

The bodies were mostly human, but there were also dead Skirrit and Tong Elves, Bowands, a scattering of Near Deads, even a pair of giant Gudridan—all of them monsters or allies of the Pale Queen.

And the destruction went beyond the castle. The entire forest had been knocked flat or burned down. Villages were gone for a hundred miles in every direction. No deer or skunk or bird or snake had survived.

Grimluk found the body of his friend the pikeman, Wick. He dug a grave for the man himself and piled stones to mark the place.

Bruise and Miladew found him standing there. Bruise had managed to upgrade his wardrobe. The one good thing that could be said for so much death was that there were now plenty of clothes to go around, although most were bloody.

“Grimluk,” Miladew said gently, touching his arm. “It is time.”

“The battle is over,” Grimluk said. “The Pale Queen lies in chains. We won.”

“The battle is over, but not the war,” Bruise said. “Drupe has called for all the wise men and witches to assemble. They will decide the fate of the Pale Queen. And we, with the last of our failing powers, must carry out the sentence.”

“Surely the sentence is death,” Grimluk said.

Miladew shook her head. “Nay, Grimluk. Four of the twelve are dead. To try and kill her now with what is left, with just eight, would kill us all.”

Grimluk hated the Pale Queen, but this news definitely gave him pause.

Drupe stood waiting for Grimluk back at the castle. “So long as Princess Ereskigal is free, the Pale Queen cannot be killed. For at the death of the Pale One, her terrible power is inherited by her vile daughter,” said the witch.

“Well, that’s messed up,” Grimluk said. Or words to that effect.

“She will be exiled to the World Beneath,” Drupe said. “She will see no sunlight, no green plant or blue sky. She will live in the kingdom of monsters, the land of the cursed dead. Forever.”

They headed back to the castle. It was wrecked, walls mostly torn down, roofs collapsed. The narrow streets were filled with bodies. In Grimluk’s grim life he had never imagined he could witness anything so grim.

He wanted nothing now but to get away from here and find his family. He would take any job now, anything that would get him away from this place of horror. Anything so long as he could be back with Gelidberry and the baby he would name Victory (he couldn’t quite remember whether it had been a boy or a girl).

And that’s what he told Drupe when they were in the now ceiling-free and three-walled meeting chamber.

“Alas, Grimluk,” Drupe said, and she laid her hand on his shoulder. “Your family is no more.”

Grimluk stared at her, trying to make sense of what she was saying.

“Gelidberry and the child were in the village of Suther when it was overrun by a troop of Gudridan.”

Gudridan were known for their giant size. And for their diet, which consisted almost entirely of human flesh.

“No,” Grimluk gasped.

He sat down very suddenly on the cold stone floor. He sighed deeply, and it was as if at that moment the last of his spirit left him forever. With all that he had endured, all that he had witnessed, all the pain, this pain was greater still.

Drupe squatted down beside him—a move made easier by the fact that she had managed to turn her ostrich leg into a deer’s leg, which was an improvement.

“You can find a new wife. You can have a new child. You will be forever honored as the leader of the Magnificent Twelve.”