A curved dirt walkway barely conquered the hills surrounding the lake, made a steep turn, and disappeared in the middle of the clear steppe; from that point onward our hope was on the strength of the cart axis. The gig jumped on hummocks and wriggled between thickets of thorns, blindly hitting some holes and rocks hidden in the grass. I kept the suitcase on my knees, trying to quench the jolts and shocks—it wasn’t altruism on my side; if not for that job, I would have to handle the horse.
“How far?” Clarence asked, his teeth clattering.
“My mate will meet us.”
“What?”
“Come on, drive!”
The horse sensed the zombie first; it began to snort and jump anxiously from side to side.
“That’s it, we have arrived! Tie up the horse—we’ll walk from here.”
“What’s the matter; can you explain?” the white mage muttered discontentedly after I had returned his suitcase.
I sighed and tried to convey all the brilliant simplicity of my plan to the provincial policeman.
“I will explain it one time only: from the side of the lake, the transition to the ‘rollback’ zone is very sharp; we reached the place of ‘normal appearance’ in three hours. Under the ‘normal appearance’ I mean presence of animals, predatory birds, and blood-sucking insects. From the side of the railroad lane, the transition is almost imperceptible. Believe me. I conclude that a pentagram that generates the shield is somewhere around here.”
“I should have taken more people for the search.” When a white mage starts to snap that means he is extremely irritated.
“Don’t fret, chief! My mate had already looked around.”
Clarence wasn’t convinced.
Max silently came out of the bushes; from the lingering grace of its movements one wanted to turn around and run away. You cannot hide the otherworldly nature! The monster that hid under the disheveled brown hair could not be seen but was felt quite clearly. Dear God, where could it pick so many thorns and spines in its fur? The white squinted warily and started unconsciously rubbing his hands against the jacket’s pocket (perhaps he kept some amulet there). There was no sense in hiding my dog any further. We were in the same boat.
I called Max and presented it to the lieutenant: “Meet my mate.” Clarence leaned over to stroke the dog. “It’s a zombie,” I finished, grabbing the shattered lieutenant by the elbow. “Quiet, quiet! Max is tame.”
Max brushed its bangs to the side and squinted whitish, lifeless eye at Clarence with interest; the head of Mihandrov’s NZAMIPS unsuccessfully tried to calm his heavy breathing. And this man was a salaried “cleaner”?!
“I was aware that all darks were crazy, but not to such a degree!”
“Well,” I was sincerely offended, “my superiors are okay with it.”
“But that creature is a zombie!”
“A silly superstition. A zombie is just a reanimated body, not a genuine supernatural phenomenon. Max is stable, that’s the main thing, and extremely helpful! You will see.”
“You should have warned me,” the gallant officer muttered angrily and pretended that he could walk by himself now.
I shrugged and followed Max; now both of them—the suitcase and the white—were hanging on me.
By the way, Clarence was fundamentally wrong about “taking more people”—the problem was not in the scale of the search. Our enemy was a magician; hence, he was able to hide traces of his activity much more reliably than ordinary people. But not from the zombie—the reanimated corpse always finds another corpse, no matter if it’s enchanted, or sprinkled with an odor-killing potion, or buried masterfully. Where hundreds of chartered detectives would have worked for a month, Max just ran around for half an hour. Now the dog trampled merrily on an unremarkable piece of grass, in the middle of a clear field, where there was absolutely nothing eye-catching.
“We will be digging here,” I concluded with a straight face.
We marked up the plot according to archaeological science and began removing sod gently. The grave was shallow; just twenty inches under the surface my shovel groped a skeleton’s hand.
“There it is…”
I heard only rustling of grass in response —Clarence rushed into the nearest bush, to vomit. The chief of NZAMIPS! What a joke! A quarter of an hour I spent bringing the white to senses, and then he lasted long enough only to make a formal report of the findings and test a couple of standard police spells on it.
“A young man, died three years ago, hard to say any more with certainty. There are traces of some magic; I’ll take its imprint. I need to bring experts to find out more.”
“Too early. For one corpse they will send ordinary criminal experts, but we need “cleaners”. I do not think that the maniac dragged the corpse on his back, and the gig won’t get here. We will search for the pentagram.”
“It’s getting dark,” the lieutenant objected weakly.
“I don’t care! Darkness sharpens the senses.”
We split up and went along an expanding spiral; Max was helping us as well, but I did not rely on it, and this proved to be right. Clarence found the oddity, not by the magic trails, but for a completely idiotic reason; he did not like the bush.
“Mr. Tangor!”
I tried to remember the place where I stopped, gave up, and went to the call.
“Well?”
“Don’t you think they are sort of… wrong?”
“Wrong” was an evergreen shrub with spikes of such size that I got sick from just looking at them.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Too straight. Too dense.”
And that was true—the wild bush looked more like a cropped hedge. It was a typical look for a garden, but completely unnatural in the wilderness. I carefully pulled apart the branches.
“Are we going inside?”
The white looked doubtfully at the prickly hedge.
“You’d better take the suitcase, or we will have to come back for it.”
The bamboo stick I left in the police office would have come in very handy! The combat magicians of the past were experts at this. To say that we got scratched by the spikes was to say nothing: one spike cut through my arm almost to the bone, and I was struck with pure and sincere hatred for the villain who set that all up. Let me get to him: he will be mutilated!
Behind the dense ring of branches the bush sharply cut off, opening up nearly empty space thirteen feet in diameter, without a hint of vegetation. The magic background intensified, and I squatted, studying the dirt.
You would guess that such an impermanent thing as chalk lines would disappear without a trace after the first rain. Perhaps, this is true for the regular chalk, but if magic energy went through the contours of the signs, the traces of whitening would be stronger than after kindling a fire. Nothing would grow in their for a long time. Even if someone put sod on top of a pentagram, it would not change anything; the grass would wither and crumble into fine dust or would be strongly inhibited. In that place the grass dried out, but slowly and in patches, circles and triangles; using a pen knife, I was able to find traces of chalk on the ground. I stood up, looking at the drawing vaguely showing through the turf.
Excellent! It did not matter whether the pentagram was related to the disappearance of people or to a weather spell; we discovered the traces of a ritual, the corpse, and now we could call the combat mages.
“Make a record of it!” I ordered Clarence, smiling predatorily.
The poor lieutenant, looking very much like a ghoul, took the necessary tools out of the suitcase.
On the way back to town I rode the gig myself. The white could not pull himself together. Of course, I was no good as a cart driver, but the horse was eager to reach its home stall, and even if I wanted to I wouldn’t be able to slow it down.