The Necromancer's Gambit: The Other Knight
Nicolas Wilson
I’m sleeping, dreaming of being asleep. That’s how tired I am.
And then my phone rings, and I vow to kill Pawn next time I see him. “You know what you said about trying to get out in front of this thing? Well, I didn’t think that meant going to the Cauldron, knocking heads, and trying to kill the bouncer.”
“The fuck’re’you talkin’bout?” I ask, neglecting to put breaks between most of the words.
“Whoa, are you completely sauced right now?”
“No; I’wish. A’sleep.”
“Well, now you’re awake. But I’ll stop for coffee before I rouse you. That should give you enough time to put clothes on and take care of any morning boners.”
There’s a half-drank Frappuccino in the fridge. I don’t know how long it’s been there, but it hasn’t developed a skin of mold over the top, so I reason it won’t kill me. It doesn’t taste right going down; if I’d been thinking I’d have watered it down with some vodka, which would have killed anything living in it and made Pawn more palatable.
I finish tying my boots just as he arrives. I barely hear him at the door, because he’s tapping on it with his foot instead of knocking. I open it up for him, and he swaggers in, a cup in each hand.
“I got you coffee.” He hands it to me, and waggles his hips like he’s hula-hooping. “I stirred it with my dick a little, cause my dick was cold; plus, they’d forgot the cream.” The sad part is I can’t put that past him; I set it down on the coffee table. “Where’s Rook? I was hoping she’d still be wearing something skimpy or see-through.”
“Why would she be here?”
“Boning you. Or sleeping on your couch.”
“She’s at a hotel. For fuck’s sake, man.”
“I just gave you more credit, is all. The piercing eyes, a jaw that juts, plus that look how fucking Mulder I am thing you do; if I had that going for me…”
“You’d shut up and tell me what’s going on.”
“Some guy at the Cauldron, claiming to be you, roughed up some of the customers. Then when Tim got involved, did their damnedest to murder him.”
“But I assume”
“He’s fine. You know that spell on him- he’s damned near indestructible. I mean, magically. You punch him in the nads and he falls to his knees like you or me, but any spell that gets cast against him,”
“He spreads the love.”
“Right. But they still nearly gave him his angel wings. Using your name.”
“And you never thought it might have been me?”
“Guy was in there talking shit, roughing up the locals. Sounded like fun. And you’re no fun- certainly not that kind of fun. Trying to kill Tim was probably too far, but again, nothing like what you do in your spare time. I mean, if they’d found a bunch of butterflies pinned to a scrapbook, or a whole mess of stamps collected in a jar, then maybe I’d believe it was you. But throwing your weight around in a bid to impress the ladies-”
“Fine.”
“So now we investigate.” I grab my coat to leave, but he notices the abandoned coffee. “What, suddenly you don’t like the taste of my dick? If I’d known that, I’d have just dipped the old tea bag in there- add a little sophistication. Oh well, just means more for me,” he says, finishing his cup and exchanging his empty for mine.
We take his Jeep, because my vision’s still blurry. I’m beginning to wonder if it’ll unblur without more sleep. I test the theory out, going unconscious at one of the lights.
This time I dream of Elise. It’s a combination, of the day she left me, and her murder. A man, cast in shadow, uses a dulled knife to cut his way into her chest. “It’s not, I can’t even be around other men. You get this- you’re not even possessive- you’re territorial. If I mention male friends, coworkers, you get pissed off and mopey. I hate the way it makes you treat me.”
He uses the handle of the knife to pound in her face, punctuating each sentence with violence: “It’s your fault. I loved you. I wanted to stay with you. To be safe. But I couldn’t.” Her lower lip splits open. It affects the way she talks, but it doesn’t stop the blows, “But you wouldn’t let me. You couldn’t let me stay, and still be my own, separate person. I didn’t want to complete you, understand?” She’s crying, and the tears run into the blood.
He sets the knife to the side, and climbs on top of her, and puts his hands around her throat. Her eyes bulge, and water, and her face turns red. “Couldn’t, you, see? I, couldn’t, survive, just, being, part, of, you.” He starts to gyrate on top of her, but the angles are all wrong, like a poorly choreographed made for TV love scene. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realize he’s having sex with one of the wounds in her chest, and I avert my eyes; even in the dream that seems strange to me, that I’d treat that as intimate. Maybe I just don’t have the stomach to watch it happen.
He makes a sound like an angry animal as she passes out, then he climbs off of her. He hammers on her chest, punching her chest more than compressing it, but after about a minute her eyes flutter open. He stops, and picks up the knife again. “This all happened because you wouldn’t just accept me.” He stabs her, in the right side, again, and again and again.
But he doesn’t stop at the handful of wounds I saw with my own eyes, he keeps going. I’m standing there, immobile; I could stop her suffering just by reaching out, and pulling him off- he’s right there in front of me. But I can’t move. My body won’t respond.
I know I’m dreaming, that I’m with Pawn, still, in the Jeep, but for some reason he won’t wake me up this time. The bastard with the knife turns, still stabbing, and I can make out some features, his teeth as he smiles, slightly bulgy, muddy eyes. I try to memorize them; I might be shit at divination, but even blind dogs sometimes find a bone.
But it keeps going. He keeps stabbing her. “Stop,” she pleads.
“Please,” I whisper, “stop it.” But our cries only make him more violent, and he ups the tempo and the depth of the strikes. I can’t watch it anymore, but I can’t look away, either. And now my mouth won’t move enough to beg. Her pain becomes the focus of the world, so real to me I feel it as my own. In the dream I scream, and I claw at my face, my eyes.
Then my head hits Pawn’s dash as he pulls the Jeep violently to the curb. “Should have put on your seatbelt before you dozed off,” he says, pleased with himself.
I rub my forehead, which is throbbing, and wonder just how big the swelling’s going to get. He opens up my door. “You coming, or am I doing all the legwork on this one?” I stumble out of my seat, and nearly fall over when my feet hit the concrete.
Pawn shuts the door behind me and then jogs to the Cauldron, not even pausing to help me stop the world from spinning.
The Cauldron’s nearly empty. It’s past closing time, so the only people still there aren’t customers anymore. There’s one booth still filled, with a round of fresh drinks on the table. But I walk up to the bar, first. “Give me a cold one, in a bottle,” I tell Trish.
“I’m not supposed to serve, after two,” she says, reaching down anyway. She hands me a bottle from the fridge.
“That’s okay. I wasn’t planning to drink it,” I tell her, and put it against my swelling forehead.
“Ah,” she says. “You catch that fucker yet?”
“We’re only now here to investigate it.” That seems to make her angry, but she stifles it. “You ever see him before?”
“No, and he had the kind of everything you’d remember. Short hair, buzzed, but wiry, in a wannabe military kind of cut- but balding, a little, and grown out in places to cover where it was patchy. A beard that matched the hair on his head, a light reddish brown with gray splotches in it. Thick, stocky, round head and features. Scars, everywhere: pock marks, more than a few cuts healed over. And he was wearing a big brown duster.”
“And what happened?”
“I didn’t see most of it. Just, Tim went down, and I grabbed the shotgun. I would have blasted him, but, I saw he had a revolver- a big revolver- strapped to his thigh. And I thought anybody walking around with a cannon like that was probably a better shot than me, so I never raised it above the bar. I picked up the phone, instead, and he got out of here in a hurry. But that table over there, they’re the ones he was talking to, when Tim went over to keep the peace. I took down everybody’s names, but I figured you’d want to talk to them before they went home.”
I sit my beer on the bar and walk over to the table. One guy in particular seems to be monopolizing the conversation, and when he notices me I can see why. His eye looks like a peeled blood orange. “Those government cumfarts are responsible for this. Look at my fucking eye. What if this shit’s permanent?”
“Hey, I’m one of those government cumfarts,” Pawn says, “I think. Aren’t we?”
“I think that’s more a matter of opinion,” I say, “though we definitely work for the Gambit.”
“Well then you need to rein your Knight in, because he was far off the chain.”
“I’m the only Knight in the Gambit,” I tell him. “He say he was from around here?” Pawn looks at me strange; it’s not likely the prick is somebody else’s Knight, but there’s more precedent for that than the alternative.
“Yeah. He was throwing his weight around. I’ve heard of the Gambit, and a friend of mine got his ass kicked when he tried to steal reagents a few years back, so I knew about the Knight. But we weren’t doing anything. I mean, maybe we were being a little loud, but it’s a club. We weren’t doing anything I thought I’d get punched over.”
“That was one punch?” Pawn asks, almost approvingly.
“And I don’t have insurance. You think the apothecary shop has benefits? Christ, the only benefit I get is a little baggy full of ragweed at the end of the month. And I’m allergic to that shit.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Scary, and big. Like football player, big.”
I look around the table. Nobody wants to contradict him, or even elaborate; he’s probably been a raging jackass since he got hit. Which is fine. Trish’s description is probably the best, her being the only sober eyewitness. But one of them in particular refuses to look at me since I asked the question, a pretty blonde, who doesn’t look old enough to be drinking. “You,” I say.
She glances defensively at Grapefruit Eye, then slides her phone across the table. She took a picture.
“He looks like a pirate,” Pawn says.
“That’s just like I said. Pirates are scary.”
“Unless they’re Orlando Bloom,” Pawn corrects him.
“Apparently you’ve never seen Kingdom of Heaven.”
“Yeah,” the doe-eyed blonde breaks in, “he weighs like as much as I do. Why does he keep getting cast as a blacksmith?”
“Okay,” I intercede, “he hits you. Then the bouncer approaches. What’d you see?”
“Jack fucking shit. I’m on my back.”
“Anybody else?”
The blonde looks around the table. She likes to be the quiet one, but right now her friends are either too drunk or too pathetic to be helpful. “He blasts the bouncer in the chest and then he goes down. Then the bartender calls the cops and he legs it.”
“Anything else?”
She thinks for a moment. “He didn’t say much. First he said, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ Then, ‘I’m Knight, and you don’t want me to shut you the fuck up.’ But he had an accent.”
“What kind?”
“I don’t know. Muddled. It wasn’t sexy.”
“All right. Thanks for your cooperation. I’ll let you know if there’s anything else we need.”
As we’re walking away, citrus peeper pipes up with, “Yeah, I feel so much safer, now that you’ve asked questions hours after I was brutalized.”
“Ungrateful cocksuckers,” Pawn mutters.
“Be nice,” I say; “some of my favorite people in the world are cocksuckers.”
“Mine too. I just wish they didn’t charge so much.” He chuckles to himself.
Tim’s holding up the wall that goes back towards the champagne room. He motions for us to follow him in there. Inside, he plops down on the couch. He’s left a couple of chairs for us. “How’re you feeling?” I ask him.
“I’ve been worse.”
“What can you tell us?”
“He was here awhile. Seemed to, get along ain’t the right word, but he got around. Talked to people. Looked menacing, but nobody complained, or even shot me a look, so I figured he’s just someone I don’t know. Later we find out he’s been using your name all night, staring people down, being a general dick. That ends with that table out there. They don’t give him the time of day. And he doesn’t cotton to that. So he decks one of them. I intervene, and he knocks me down like it’s nothing.”
“What’d he do, exactly?”
“It was quick, man. If he incanted, he mumbled it, under his breath, and he might have touched something in his jacket. But I’ve seen people pull a gun slower than that- or throw a fist. Something hit me. And suddenly my chest felt like a pop can, and like it was just getting crushed in like one. It was bad enough I passed out- which from the guy’s response, probably saved my ass. I’m pretty sure he only left because he thought I was dead. I should have been. Every jacktard I’ve ever tossed out on their asses just got about half what I did. Holy shit. I can’t imagine how that would have gone if I were just some normal asshole. I mean, I guess I’d be dead- it’s just hard to fathom that.”
“I don’t suppose you recognize the spell.”
“Not even a little. And I’ve had about everything but the kitchen sink thrown at me in this place. So I’m guessing something a little more exotic. Asian, African- a bit off the usual pagan path. But, I did get something for you guys.”
He gestures to the table behind us, and a glass. “A half-drank glass of scotch,” I say, “you shouldn’t have.”
“It was his. That big, greasy thumb print is his, too. And you might even get enough saliva off the rim for a decent spell, maybe tracking, maybe just a remote dick-punching.”
I wrap it in a handkerchief and pick it up. “Thanks. This should help.”
“Yeah. I still feel like an ass for not getting him for you.”
“You did what you could.”
“Yeah. Just punch him in the dick extra hard for me.”
“I intend to,” Pawn says.
We head out. Trish nods as we leave. The club rats have already skittered away. Back on the street Pawn stops to light up a cigar.
“I guess that whole anonymity thing bites both ways. Before, it seemed enough that impostors had to worry what we’d do when we caught up to em. Now it looks like we might have to find a new way to identify ourselves in public. Monogrammed t-shirts? Dick tattoos?”
“Maybe it’s time I got myself a little tin star,” I say.