The Necromancer's Gambit: The Preperation
Nicolas Wilson
The Preperation
We get in the car and start speeding again. Rook shifts uncomfortably in her seat before finally coming out with it: “One thing’s bothering me: if the tesseract spell is still intact, what was the fireball that roasted Castle and the trees at his cabin?”
“That was the murder weapon.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. On the bright side, it narrows down who we’re looking at. There are maybe a dozen people in the city capable of that. I’d guess another dozen out of towners.”
The next fifteen minutes of the trip back are quiet. Rook is in the deep end, now, and I can see it in her face she isn’t sure she can handle it, so I don’t press her. I regret that when she finally speaks. “This is stupid, right?”
“Excuse me.”
“Well, the tesseract spell that’s keeping Castle’s body from crumbling into a pillar of ash, it’s failing. We don’t know how fast- only that it is. We also don’t know what shape the Fortress is in. So you could be walking into a burning building moments before it collapses.”
“Basically.”
“So it is stupid. I thought it was just me. So why are you doing it?”
“It’s the job. It’s where my crime scene is. And I need to know if anybody’s missing. And there’s… another reason, too. How familiar are you with binding hexes?”
“They’re sympathetic magic, of the voodoo doll variety. They’re nasty stuff- perverting the magical connection so two things are permanently joined.”
“Yeah. The side effects tend toward the grotesque side. Well, I’m worried there’s a bind on Castle, keeping him alive- that even after his body falls apart, he’ll still be bound to it, suffering everything that’s been done to it.”
“Is that even possible?”
“I’ve only ever heard of it- never seen it up close- but we’re past the point of asking if things are possible, to dealing with the things that are.”
She stares out at the city rushing past. “But what are the odds that there’s one of those hexes? Or we’ll even be able to do anything about it?”
“Castle was a friend of mine. I have to be sure.”
“And what if it gets you killed? Do I get an early promotion?” I don’t smile. “Or what if instead there is one of those hexes you’re worried about, and you end up stuck inside with Castle, and you both suffer for eternity.”
“Misery loves company. Besides, it wouldn’t be forever, just however long it takes for bones to biodegrade- so a few hundreds of years.”
“So what you’re telling me is you have two speeds: so laid back I want to punch you in the dick to make sure you’re still alive. Then masochistically and moronically rushing gleefully towards almost certain demise.”
“Why do women always want to punch me in the dick?”
“You just have that kind of personality.”
When we get there, I text Pawn to come back. The Hole is a safe enough place to leave the royals, and we need him in the city more.
I’m almost surprised it’s Harry who greets us at the door. “About how certain are you that Castle’s still stuck in there, and the place isn’t going to snap shut on me the moment I walk in?”
“I’d be more certain if I had chicken.”
“We’ll order you some damn chicken, Harry. Christ. Have we ever welched on you?”
“A man can’t take chances when there’s chicken on the line.”
“Has he been this big a pain in the ass all night?” I ask Bishop.
“Worse, actually,” she says. “He’s calmed down.”
“As far as certainty,” Harry starts, “well, the recently dead tend to be pretty useless witnesses. The trauma and stress of dying takes a lot out of them. When I pressed Castle, about the only printable word I got out of him was, ‘hurry.’ So that’s about as good as I can do for you.”
“This is insane,” Bishop says.
I gesture to Rook. “We’ve already had that conversation. It’s a lousy idea. But it’s a lousy circumstance.”
Bishop crosses her arms indignantly. “Fuck you and your noble sentiments. I’m not helping you kill yourself.”
Without her, it’s going to take us hours to figure out how to breach the Fortress- hours during which this goes from being an ill-advised misadventure to near as certain suicide. But I’m fairly certain she’s bluffing, so I call. “Castle would have done it for me.”
“Ugh.” Her shoulders shrink. She’s disgusted because it’s the one thing I could say to get her to shut up and do it. “I’d hoped you wouldn’t say that.” She opens the door into the smaller side lab, the one with the steel-reinforced concrete walls and the drain in the middle of the floor; it’s the lab she uses when an experiment is likely to turn someone into a paste she’ll have to rinse down the drain. I call it the bunker. “But I never live in hope- I prepare, then hope I never have to use my preparation.”
“So how likely is this to turn me into a paste?” I ask, and she shrugs. She’s drawn sigils on the floor, and marked the points of a pentagram with candles: silver, blue, purple, red, but the last makes me pause. “I get the rest, but orange?”
“General success. It’s a Hail Marie.”
“You know how much I love those.”
“I figured you could use all the luck you can get.”
“Everything set up?”
“Pretty much.”
“You’re a sweetheart,” I give Bishop a peck on the cheek. She freezes for a second, before she slaps me with everything she’s got.
“Don’t be an asshole. You start making goodbyes and you’ll get the silly idea not to come back.” I give her a faint smile. “Is the moon up?”
“Somewhere- but moonrise isn’t for another few hours local.”
“It’ll have to do. What are we using?”
She’s a little reluctant to even tell me. “Empsychosis.”
“Clever,” I say.
“Somebody want to let me in on what that is?” Rook asks.
“Modern witches and their practical magic.” Bishop shakes her head. “Ancient Assyrian ritual. Known as the opening of the mouth. It was to breath life into statues of their gods. But in this case, we’re going to be breathing Knight inside the Fortress. At least, that’s the theory.”
“Theory?”
“Yeah. It’s not like we’ve ever tested this out.”
“Shit.” I say. “I almost forgot. We got a soil sample from Castle’s cabin. We thought maybe we could cast a tracking spell with it; Rook’s going to set it up.” Bishop’s eyebrows raise; usually I’d ask her to do it- I hope I haven’t stepped on her toes.
Rook notices the tension, so she’s purposely timid when she asks, “Could I bum some reagents?”
And Bishop decides to be intrigued rather than insulted. “Sure. I’ll show you where I keep everything.” Bishop takes us back into the main lab; she gathers the ingredients from memory without even thinking about it.
Rook looks the ingredients over, then asks “You don’t have any gray wolf menstrual blood do you?”
“Hmm,” Bishop says, and goes scurrying for it.
The blood itself is innocuous- as likely as not a folk addition to the spell thrown in by the Salem Coven. But the way Rook mixes the spell, there’s an artistry to it, like watching Emmaneul Ax’s fingers on the piano. Bishop is transfixed, and I’m almost surprised she doesn’t applaud when it’s finished.
“But does it work?” I ask. Rook holds up the little bag on the end of a string. It spins, but only because the string was wound up, and once it unwinds and rebounds, it stops moving.
“Well,” Rook says, “it works, but whoever we’re tracking isn’t in range.”
I take it from her. “And what is the range?”
Bishop wants to tell me the standard, but she holds off because she’s savvy enough to suspect the standard is a lowball. “Couple miles, maybe. I mean, if we had something with a stronger connection, hair, blood, we could crank it up to five. But dirt he stepped in.”
“That’s enough. We’ll run it down after we’ve dealt with Castle.” Bishop leads us back into the bunker. Harry’s cat is sitting on the wooden table in the corner, and he pets it. “That furballs not going to interfere with the spell, is she?”
“Nah,” Harry says. “She’s pretty well behaved- unless you’re using tuna as a reagent- and then I make no guarantees.”
Pawn walks into the room, and sidles up against the back wall by the door. He doesn’t know exactly why he’s here, but he’s got that smile on him that says he suspects I’m up to something. I forget that, even though he’s a fuck up, he can be a wily bastard, too. “I’m glad you made it before I, uh, stepped out. Rook’s got a soil sample from Castle’s, and she’s set up a tracking spell for you.” I dangle it in front of him on the string, and he takes it, pockets it.
“But what about the King and Queen?” Bishop asks.
“Rook should be able to handle a shift in the Hole,” I say.
Bishop blinks, because she doesn’t believe she heard me right. “She’s completely un-fucking-qualified for that,” Bishop sounds moments from an aneurism.
“But she’s more qualified to castle than to follow up on that lead,” I reply. Pawn’s bemused already, though I don’t know if he gets the endgame or is just enjoying Bishop’s apoplectics.
“With her, the royals are barreled fish- no, they’re lemon and peppered, pre-cooked salmon holding up a little sign that says, ‘Please eat me, I’m delicious.’” And then she gets it. “You son of a bitch. You want me out of the lab- and that’s how you’re going to do it. By making me babysit. You unbelievable fuckwit.” She hits me in the arm, but then she smiles; she enjoys the game, even if sometimes she loses. “I am going to give you such a cursing when this is over.”
“Take my phone,” I say, and hand it over to Rook, who gives me the bug eyes. “Teleportation spells are kind of like walking through a microwave oven. Electronics get fried. Besides which, anybody trying to get ahold of me won’t get a signal through.”
Bishop’s back to business, and levels her eyes at me. “Standard teleportation protocols. Close your eyes, hold your breath.”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“You better. I don’t have the time to help you get over another case of teleportation blindness. Now you’ll want to put on that glove.” It’s long, one of those gloves that goes way past the elbow, most of the way up the forearm, so I take off my coat and start to roll up my shirt. I know well enough to trust Bishop about it- and well enough to be worried that she gave me that much glove.
She must see it in my face. “The sigil is in his pooper. Castle’s idea of a joke, I think. Taking it in the butt to get into prison- not that he didn’t have a better way in- but we’re forced to use the back door- no pun intended, at least not by me- though I think that might have been Castle’s intent along.”
“Why?” Rook asks.
“Aside from the men in this Gambit all being children, I think it was to keep the sigil protected. It needed to be physically on him- and someplace you couldn’t just casually get to, in a bar or even a brawl. If it weren’t for all the fire damage, we’d probably be able to just put a hand on his lower back, since we knot the password, but desperate times.”
Bishop gives me a squirt of some kind of jelly and smears it all over the glove, but I hesitate. “Don’t be shy. That glove will protect you from whatever’s up there. Reach your hand in and grab a pound of flesh.” I don’t want to even imagine the look on my face as I push my hand into the corpse; there’s something sharp and pointed, which I assume is part of the activator, and wrap my fingers around.
Bishop’s already muttering something in Assyrian, and when I look over to her she finishes and opens her eyes. “Now this part- this part’s going to burn like scrubbing your foreskin with steel wool.” Pawn and I wince together. He nods at me, grimly.
Then my entire body bursts into flames.