“I do as Lord Arawn bids me. And you will do as your commander bids you. Now, go.”
As Virgule leapt up onto the rooftop and climbed the spire back up into the rend, Jackaby pushed himself up. He tore off a particularly flappy bit of his tattered coat and sighed. One of the front pockets had been ripped halfway off, and a knot of yarn was protruding. Jackaby pulled it out. Hatun’s hat. He regarded it with a somber look in his eyes and then stuffed it on his head. He looked as ridiculous as he had the day we met. “Somebody’s got to keep the world in one piece until help arrives,” he said, “and it looks like we’re it.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Had I been less secure in my own talents, I might have found it somewhat embarrassing to be the least graceful person in a group that also consisted of a madman wearing a lumpy tea cozy on his head and a grievously injured woman with only one functional arm. Jackaby and Serif moved through the stronghold like shadows, however, and I kept up with them as stealthily as I could.
Within the tall curtain walls of the hold stood half a dozen stout stone buildings with thatched roofs, all circling a fortified tower: the keep, the top of which had been replaced with a broad dome, like the roof of an observatory. Wooden scaffolding circled the outside of the structure, climbing halfway up the walls. Behind this, I could see thick metal tubes and snaking pipes that had punched their way out of the stonework and clung all over the tower like ivy. Here and there in the larger gaps between the metal and the bricks, I made out glimpses of what lay beyond.
It was like peeking into the inner workings of an enormous clock. If the Palace of Westminster were reduced to ruins and its great Clock Tower riddled with cracks, the effect might be similar. I could see bits and pieces of truly massive cogs revolving within the masonwork.
We made our way down from the wall along a very narrow, excruciatingly exposed staircase. With every step I was waiting for an alarm to sound and the entire compound to descend upon us. Miraculously, we reached the ground without incident. No sooner had we done so, however, than we heard the pounding of feet and the clatter of steel. Without a word, all three of us pressed into the shadows of the nearest structure, a rectangular building that smelled of hay and manure.
I held my breath as five, ten, twenty soldiers hurried up the narrow stairs we had just dismounted. Their ears stuck out like goblins’, but unlike goblins, these troops were seven feet tall at the shortest. They were broad shouldered, with forearms as thick as a grown man’s waist. Although leaner and faster than the mountainous ogres, they still looked as though they were bred for battle.
“Trolls,” whispered Jackaby.
The troll in front stood at the top of the stairs and yelled something in a voice that sounded like a mixture of human vocal cords and untuned cello strings. I did not recognize the language. The rest of them split off evenly, half moving along the top of the wall to the left, the other half to the right.
“They’re looking for us, in case there was any question,” Serif hissed from her quiet patch of darkness. “They have noticed that someone in this castle is dropping ogres and pitching vampire heads off the walls. The commander just reminded his troops that they are under orders not to let the intruders get out of here alive.”
“Well, that’s good news, at least,” Jackaby whispered. “They’re worried about us getting out of here. They don’t know we’re still working on getting in.”
“That is a great comfort, sir,” I answered.
We kept to the shadows whenever possible, moving ever inward toward the domed keep in the center. For the last stretch, Jackaby found us cover by climbing up within the rafters of a long, thatched building. The crawl space was narrow and cramped, but better a claustrophobic attic than a claustrophobic coffin. From the chamber beneath us I could smell steam and blood and raw meat, and I found myself hoping very much that we were above a kitchen. We reached the end and peeked through the thatch. A courtyard lay directly between us and the tower, and in this space stood milling at least a hundred monstrous creatures. I recognized more trolls, imps, and ogres, but there were also swarms of fairies no bigger than locusts, great mangy wolves the size of bears, and wraithlike figures in tattered black robes who seemed to swim through the air, their rags trailing behind them like seaweed behind a trawler.
“Wights,” Jackaby breathed. “Brownies, manticores, kaiju, jumbies, lobs, hobs—just about every Unseelie creature ever mentioned in Mendel’s Magical Menagerie—and a few even I don’t recognize.”
“We’ll go around to the back of the keep,” said Serif.
“We’ll need a distraction if we hope to get to the far side of the tower without being seen by that crowd,” I said.
“Leave that to me.” Serif reached into her robes with her good hand and pulled out a slim metal tube. She selected a dart from a little wooden box and slid it into the tube.
“Poison?” Jackaby inquired as Serif maneuvered herself painfully into a position from which she could see the throng through the thatch.
“Boxwood ash and mandrake root,” she answered.
“That’s a somnifacient, isn’t it?” said Jackaby.
“We use it as a kobold sedative.”
“Might be effective against the hobs, then, but even if it is, putting a single hob to sleep won’t do much to improve our situation.”
“This is not my first mission, Seer. It would drop a kobold, hob, or any lesser oddling. Against trollkin, however, it has the opposite effect,” she grunted. “Increases violent tendencies.”
“Best not to do that, then,” Jackaby said.
Serif’s cheeks puffed out and the pipe made a soft thoom. I pushed my head up to peer through the scratchy thatch. A muscular troll carrying a cudgel the size of a small child slapped at his neck as though bitten by a mosquito. He spun angrily, his lips curled back in a snarl.
“You missed,” said Jackaby.
“I really didn’t.”
The big troll glared at the swarm of brownies fluttering in the air behind him and swung the cudgel through the cloud, which scattered and chittered angrily. The cudgel, finding very little resistance from the brownies, slammed instead into the back of a pale giant who sat hunched over in the dirt. The giant unfolded. He was so massive, he could have leaned casually with his elbow on the head of one of the ogres we had fought earlier. Beneath ice-white hair and pallid skin, he wore a simple tunic that might have doubled as the sail of a Spanish galleon.
“Oh. Oh my. That’s got the j?tun’s attention now,” Jackaby said. “This is the plan?”