The Creature in the Case (Abhorsen 3.50)

The second checkpoint was a much more serious affair than the first, blocking the road with two heavy chain-link-and-timber gates, built between concrete pillboxes that punctuated the first of the Perimeter’s many defensive lines, a triple depth of concertina wire five coils high that stretched to the east and west as far as the eye could see.

One of the gates had been knocked off its hinges, and there were more bodies on the ground just beyond it. These soldiers had been wearing mail coats and helmets, which hadn’t saved them. More soldiers were running out of the pillboxes, and there were several in firing positions to the side of the road, though they’d stopped shooting because of the risk of hitting their own people farther north.

Nick throttled back and weaved the motorcycle through the slalom course of bodies, debris from the gate, and the live but shaken soldiers who were staring north. He was just about to accelerate away when someone shouted behind him.

‘You on the motorcycle! Stop!’

Nick felt an urge to open the throttle and let the motorcycle roar away, but his intelligence overruled his instinct. He stopped and looked back, wincing as the thin sole of his left carpet slipper tore on a piece of broken barbed wire.

The man who had shouted ran up and, greatly surprising Nick, jumped on the pillion seat behind him.

‘Get after it!’

Nick only had a moment to gain a snapshot of his unexpected passenger. He was an officer, not visibly armed, wearing formal dress blues with more miniatures of gallantry medals than he should have, since he looked no more than twenty-one. He had the three pips of a captain on his sleeves and, more important, on his shoulders the metal epaulette tags NPRU, for the Northern Perimeter Reconnaissance Unit, or as it was better known, the Crossing Point Scouts.

‘I know you, don’t I?’ shouted the captain over the noise of the engine and rush of the wind. ‘You tried out for the Scouts last week?’

‘Uh, no,’ Nick shouted back. He had just realized that he knew his passenger too. It was Francis Tindall, who had been at Forwin Mill as a lieutenant six months ago. ‘I’m afraid I’m … well, I’m Nicholas Sayre.’

‘Nick Sayre! I bloody hope this isn’t going to be like last time we met!’

‘No! But that creature is a Free Magic thing!’

‘Got a hostage, too, from the look of it. Skinny old duffer. Pointless carrying him along. We’ll still shoot.’

‘He’s an accomplice. It’s already killed a lot of people down south.’

‘Don’t worry, we’ll settle its hash,’ Tindall shouted confidently. ‘You don’t happen to know exactly what kind of Free Magic creature it is? Can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like it, but I only got a glimpse. Didn’t expect anything like that to run past the window at a dining-in night at Checkpoint Two.’

‘No, but it’s bulletproof and it gets power by drinking the blood of Charter Mages.’

Whatever Tindall said in response was lost in the sound of gunfire up ahead, this time long, repeated bursts of machine-gun fire, and Nick saw red tracer bouncing up into the air.

‘Slow down!’ ordered Tindall. ‘Those are the enfilading guns at Lizzy and Pearl. They’ll stop firing when the thing hits the gate at Checkpoint One.’

Nick obediently slowed. The road was straight ahead of them, but dark, the moon having sunk farther. The red tracer was the only thing visible, crisscrossing the road four or five hundred yards ahead of them.

Then big guns boomed in unison.

‘Star shell,’ said Tindall. ‘Thanks to a southerly wind.’

A second after he spoke, four small suns burst high above, and everything became stark black and white, either harshly lit or in blackest shadow.

In the light, Nick saw another deep defensive line of high concertina wire, and another set of gates. He also saw the creature slow not at all, but simply jump up and over thirty feet of wire, smashing its way past the two or three fast but foolish soldiers who tried to stick a bayonet in it as it hit the ground running.

Dorrance was no longer on its back.

Nick saw him a moment later, lying in the middle of the road. Braking hard, he lost control of the bike at the last moment, and it flipped up and out, throwing both him and Tindall onto the road, but fortunately not at any speed.

Nick lay there for a moment, the breath knocked out of him by the impact. After a minute, he slowly got to his feet. Captain Tindall was already standing, but only on one foot.

‘Busted ankle,’ he said as he hopped over to Dorrance. ‘Why, it’s that idiot jester Dorrance! What on earth would someone like him be doing with that creature?’

‘Serving Her,’ whispered Dorrance, his voice startling both Tindall and Nick. The older man had been shot several times and looked dead, his chest black and sodden with blood. But he opened his eyes and looked directly at Nick, though he clearly saw something or someone else. ‘I knew Her as a child, in my dreams, never knowing She was real. Then Malthan came, and I saw Her picture, and I remembered Father sending Her away. He was mad, you know. Lackridge found Her for me again. It was as I remembered, Her voice in my head … She only wanted to go home. I had to help Her. I had to …’

His voice trailed away and his eyes lost their focus. Dorrance would play the fool no more in Corvere.

‘If it wants to go north, I suppose we could do worse than just let it go across the Wall,’ said Tindall. He waved at someone at the checkpoint and made a signal, crossing his arms twice. ‘If it can, of course. We can send a pigeon to the Guards at Barhedrin, leave it to them to sort out.’

‘No, I can’t do that,’ said Nick. ‘I … I’m already responsible for loosing the Destroyer upon them, and I did nothing to help fight it. Now I’ve done it again. That creature would not be free if it weren’t for me. I can’t just leave it to Lirael, I mean the Abhorsen … or whoever.’

‘Some things are best left to those who can deal with them,’ said Tindall. ‘I’ve never seen a Free Magic creature move like that. Let it go.’

‘No,’ said Nick. He started walking up the road. Tindall swore and started hopping after him.

‘What are you going to do? You have the Mark, I know, but are you a Mage?’

Nick shook his head and started to run. A sergeant and two stretcher bearers were coming through the gate, while many more soldiers ran purposefully behind them. With star shell continuing to be fired overhead, Nick could clearly see beyond the gates to a parade ground, with a viewing tower or inspection platform next to it, and beyond that a collection of low huts and bunkers and the communications trenches that zigzagged north.

‘The word for the day is Collection and the countersign is Treble,’ shouted Tindall. ‘Good luck!’

Nick waved his thanks and concentrated on ignoring the pain in his feet. Both his slippers were ripped to pieces, barely more than shreds of cloth holding on at the heels and toes.

The sergeant saluted as he went past, and the stretcher bearers ignored him, but the two soldiers at the gate aimed their rifles at him and demanded the password. Nick gave it, silently thanking Tindall, and they let him through.

‘Lieutenant! Report!’ shouted a major Nick almost ran into as he entered the communications trench on the northern side of the parade ground. But he ignored the instruction, dodging past the officer. A few steps farther on, he felt something warm strike his back, and his arms and hands suddenly shone with golden Charter Magic fire. It didn’t harm him at all, but actually made him feel better and helped him recover his breath. He ran on, oblivious to the shocked Charter Mage behind him, who had struck him with his strongest spell of binding and immobility.

Soldiers stood aside as he ran past, the Charter Magic glow alerting them to his coming. Some cheered in his wake, for they had seen the creature leap over them, and they feared that it might return before a Scout came to deal with it, as they dealt with so many of the strange things that came from the north.

At the forward trench, Nick found himself suddenly among a whole company

of garrison infantry. All one hundred and twenty of them clustered close together in less than sixty yards of straight trench, all standing to on the firing step, looking to the front. The wind was still from the south, so their guns would almost certainly work, but none was firing.

A harried-looking captain turned to see what had caused the sudden ripple of movement among the men near the communications trench, and he saw a strange, very irregularly dressed lieutenant outlined in tiny golden flames. He breathed a sigh of relief, hopped down from the step, and stood in front of Nick.

‘About time one of you lot got here. It’s plowing through the wire toward the Wall. D Company shot at it for a while, but that didn’t work, so we’ve held back. It’s not going to turn around, is it?’

‘Probably not,’ said Nick, not offering the certainty the captain had hoped for. He saw a ladder and quickly climbed up it to stand on the parapet.

The Wall lay less than a hundred yards away, across barren earth crisscrossed with wire. There were tall poles of carved wood here and there, quietly whistling in the breeze among the metal pickets and the concertina wire. Wind flutes of the Abhorsen, there to bar the way from Death. A great many people had died along the Wall and the Perimeter, and the border between Life and Death was very easily crossed in such places.

Nick had seen the Wall before, farewelling his friend Sam on vacation. But apart from a dreamlike memory of it wreathed in fierce golden fire, he had never seen it as more than an antiquity, just an old wall like any other medieval remnant in a good state of preservation. Now he could see the glow of millions of Charter Marks moving across, through, and under the stones.