These ghouls weren’t in Antoine’s class, however. If Antoine’s shroud went to Harvard, this shroud was illiterate. Savage, gray-skinned, black-toothed, and covered in viscera, they looked only too willing to kill their food if the reaper couldn’t do it for them.
“Take the scythe,” I told Granuaile. “I will throw them to you off-balance. Finish them or else get out of the way.”
“Ready,” she puffed, and nodded at me. She looked ready to hurl; the smell of death and sulfur was inescapable. But she could handle the scythe; I’d been training her primarily in the quarterstaff, and she could adapt some of those moves.
I approached the shroud, wagering that since dead bodies rarely fought back, they’d be rather unskilled fighters that depended largely on their strength and claws to win the day. There were eight of them, though, and I doubted they would politely wait their turns to take me on one at a time. The wood flooring that concealed the demons from Amber also cut me off from drawing any more power; I had to fuel everything on what I had left in my bear charm. Perhaps a gambit was in order.
The laws of Druidry tend to frown on binding animated creatures, and it’s impossible to bind synthetics and difficult to mess with iron. But apart from that, anything goes. The flooring wasn’t nailed down—it was simply plywood sheets atop the dirt. I created a binding between the middle of one sheet and the denim jeans of a body halfway up the stack on the far wall. Normally this would make both the jeans and the plywood fly to meet each other, but since the body wearing the jeans was crushed underneath so many others and couldn’t budge, only the plywood was free to move. Once I energized the binding, the plywood flew up and back to the wall and, functioning like a giant bookend, mowed down a couple of ghouls on the way, though without doing them much harm. More important, it left some exposed earth, where I could access more energy.
I stepped into the space, felt the earth replenish me, and set myself in an aikido stance. The shroud of ghouls saw the challenge and charged me.
Not for the first time, I wished ghouls were truly undead, like vampires. If that were the case, I could simply unbind them back to their component elements. But ghouls were living creatures, a human variant now mutated into a dead end, har de har har. Back when I was a much younger man—in the second century or so—an idiot wizard somewhere in Arabia had created the first ghul by summoning a demon to possess a poor young man. The demon had a taste for necrotic flesh and grew stronger by it, forcing the host to gorge on bodies that the wizard provided. Eventually the wizard realized he’d made a horrible mistake—perhaps because he was getting tired of procuring bodies—and exorcised the demon. He didn’t realize that the man was forever changed, despite the exorcism. When the wizard went to kill the man—for dead men tell no tales—he presumed him as weak as any human, only to discover that the man was quite strong indeed. Said man instead killed the wizard and escaped. Continuing to hunger for dead flesh, the man noticed that his skin was turning gray. He soon realized that if he fed that hunger on a steady basis—defiled graves and feasted on what he found—he could maintain a normal appearance and even enjoy strength beyond that of ordinary humans. His abilities—and his curse—got passed down once he married and had children. His kids were perfectly normal until they hit puberty, when they began wasting away and turning gray. At that point Daddy took them to a cemetery and said, “Here, kids—what you need is a nice corpse snack. Clotted blood! Om nom nom!”
All ghouls were descended from that common ancestor, but this particular branch of the family had clearly decided to throw in their lot with the demons that created them. They weren’t making any effort to appear human—or to charge me with a modicum of respect, considering that I’d just taken out a reaper. Their tactics seemed confined to run, leap at my throat, and roar at me.
Aikido is a discipline ideally suited to redirecting energy and using the opponent’s momentum in your favor, and it includes a training set called taninzudori, in which one practices against multiple attackers. I’d found it a refreshing twentieth-century adaptation of older styles. The ghouls, therefore, found themselves thrown or spun awkwardly behind me, where Granuaile was waiting with the scythe. Though the weapon is somewhat unwieldy, it tends to deliver mortal blows, which Granuaile distributed quickly. The last three, seeing what had happened to the rest of the shroud, reconsidered their charge and slowed down. They began to spread out in a half circle.
Meanwhile, behind me, the unbridled panic of the other carnival goers was subsiding just enough for them to start shouting questions, since they had seen us kill some bad guys and assumed we must have all the answers.
“What’s going on? Can you get us out of here? What are those things? Don’t you have a gun?”
I didn’t know how any of this would be explained to the survivors—somehow I doubted they’d believe it was a pocket of swamp gas—but first I had to ensure that there would be survivors. And I also needed to find the portal that the demons had used to get here. So far I hadn’t spotted it, but I hadn’t had the luxury of time to look around either.
I didn’t want to go on the attack, because it would leave my back open and they were set now, so I hawked up something juicy and spit at the one on my right. It landed right on his forehead, and he promptly lost his ghoulish composure. It wasn’t that he was grossed out; ghouls find far fouler substances than sputum to be quite tasty. He simply knew an insult when it smacked wetly on his face. Enraged, he lunged at me, and I tossed him at the one on the left, sending them both tumbling. That left the ghoul in the center all alone for a few seconds with no backup. I charged him and shoved my fingers into his eyes. He scratched me deeply on either side of my rib cage, burning cuts I’d have to work hard to heal, but he backed off and would never see the coup de grace coming. I grabbed one of his arms and whipped him around so that my back was to the wall of bodies, then kicked him in the chest so that he was staggering backward, where Granuaile could easily finish him. I backpedaled at the approach of the other two, who had disentangled and were coming now.