“I will walk.”
“Very well.” Burghard stepped to the edge of the dock. “Is the payment adequate?” he called to the boat’s owner, who was crouched on the ice watching it burn.
“Oh aye, aye,” the man nodded, waving cheerfully. “Ye be free always to borrow any boat of mine.”
“At least someone is clearing a profit this evening,” muttered Burghard bitterly.
The boat, a seething inferno now, rolled over and by slow degrees fell through the broken and melted ice, and through the clouds of steam the burning cross beams could be seen to fall one at a time, like counting fingers.
The innkeeper’s eyes narrowed with annoyance when Doyle ducked under the lintel and stepped into the room, then widened in surprise when he saw Burghard and the others follow him in. “This fellow is with you, Owen?” the innkeeper asked doubtfully.
“Yes, Boaz,” Burghard snapped, “and the Brotherhood will pay for all damages he may have done. Have you seen a—”
“The man who fell with me onto the tables,” Doyle interrupted. “Where is he?”
“That one? Yes, damn it, he—”
The house trembled, as if a powerful bass organ had begun playing a dirge in notes too deep to hear, and a high, flat singing could be faintly heard, seeming to come from a great distance away. The chain around Doyle’s ankle began vibrating strongly. It itched.
“Where is he?” Burghard shouted.
Abruptly a lot of things happened at once. The candles in the wooden chandeliers flared and spouted like Fourth of July fireworks, bouncing bright purple fireballs off the ceiling and casting heavy clouds of a shockingly malodorous smoke, and with a racket of tearing and snapping the tables sprang to pieces, tossing food, dishes, pitchers and diners in all directions, and as Doyle blinked roundabout in the sudden pandemonium he noticed that a long, twisting white funnel like a tornado had appeared over the head of Boaz the innkeeper. Doyle looked at the sprawled diners and saw a similar funnel twisting and swelling over each head. In sudden fright he looked up, but no ectoplasmic larva writhed above him, nor, he ascertained a moment later, over the heads of any of his companions.
It must be the chains, he thought, protecting us from this unholy Pentecost. Glancing down, he saw that his chain was fizzing brightly with gold sparks, and his companions each seemed to be wearing a whole ignited pack of sparklers on the right boot.
The exploded tables hastily reassembled themselves into vaguely anthropoid shapes, their face surfaces bristling with twitching splinters like iron filings on a magnet, and they began stumbling and lurching through the purple-lit smoke, slamming their wooden arms randomly against people, walls and each other, like blind berserkers.
“Circle!” Burghard yelled, and Doyle found himself pushed between Longwell and Stowell as the members of the Antaeus Brotherhood shifted their positions to form a loop. The others had drawn swords and daggers, and though Doyle couldn’t see how such mundane weapons could damage adversaries like these, he crouched forward to wrench the sword from the scabbard of a diner who’d been felled on his way to the door.
The white funnels now stretched rapidly upward and all slapped against one point on the ceiling. A big lump of the stuff began forming there. The dozen or so people who were connected by their heads to this spidery unpleasantness had, whether sitting, standing or lying down, ceased all motion, but now they all turned imbecilically calm eyes toward the circle of armed men by the front door. And the ungainly wooden men paused, as if listening, and then, blind no longer, all turned to face the Brotherhood and shuffled toward them with a cautious restraint.
One of them paused in front of Burghard and drew its table leg arm back for a smashing blow, but before it swung Burghard lunged in and poked his sword against the thing’s shoulder joint, and the block of wood that was its arm ceased to adhere to the table top that was its chest, and fell off and banged on the floor.
Without conscious thought Doyle leaped forward in a hop-lunge that put his point squarely in the belly of another—and brought tears to his eyes from the pain in his foot—and the thing fell to the ground like an armful of firewood.
In the ensuing melee this proved to be the way to deal with the things, and though Stowell was knocked unconscious by a blow from one of them and Doyle’s right arm was nearly paralyzed by a blow on the point of the shoulder, in a couple of minutes of leaping, ducking and lunging they’d reduced all of the things except one to inert lumber—the exception was the last one which, when it had found itself alone facing four swords, had in a remarkably human display of dismayed panic, run out the open front door.
Though the purple fireballs had started a small fire or two among the tossed and scattered kindling, the chandeliers had subsided to their normal radiance and the acrid smoke had largely dissipated. “He’s on the premises somewhere,” Burghard gasped. “Let’s try the kitchen—and stay together.” He started forward.
“Wait,” came a chorus of flat voices, followed by a shuffling and knocking as Boaz and a dozen of his luckless patrons were drawn erect by the ectoplasmic umbilicus attached to their heads. Several of them drew swords and daggers, and the rest—including a couple of matronly ladies—picked up heavy, club-length pieces of lumber.
Doyle looked up at the intersection of all the white funnels, and saw that the lump that had grown on the ceiling there was now formed into a huge eyeless face, and the puppet-string tentacles all trailed out of its gaping, flap-lipped mouth.
“Doyle,” said all of the people in weird unison, “gather the remnants of your men and try to find a retreat so obscure that my wrath can’t follow.”
“Right, Burghard,” said Doyle, trying hard to keep hysteria from shrilling his voice, “a wizard in a hurry would head for the kitchen—where there’d be fire and boiling water and whatnot all just waiting for him.”
Doyle, Burghard, Longwell and the other remaining member, a short, stocky fellow, made a dash for the kitchen, but were instantly blocked by the innkeeper and diners.
Doyle ducked under a fat lady’s swing and managed to rap the board out of her hands with his sword pommel a moment before parrying a sword point that was rushing at his chest. His body automatically lunged forward in a riposte, and only at the last possible instant did he override the reflex and turn his sword to drive the knuckle guard, rather than the lethal point, into the belly of his puppet attacker.
The old lady had danced around behind him, and with a crabapple fist gave Doyle a hard punch in the kidney. He roared with pain and spun, kicking her legs out from under her, and as she tumbled he whirled his blade in a horizontal arc that snicked right through the white snake attached to her head—both ends shrivelled away, and the long end snapped up elastically and slapped the ceiling before being slurped like disgusting spaghetti into the now-grinning mouth. The fallen lady began snoring.
Though attacking with concentrated skill and attention, the erstwhile diners were muttering like sleep-walkers; one man who backed Doyle into a corner with a fast and deceptive series of sword thrusts—the instinctive parrying of which made Doyle profoundly thankful that Steerforth Benner had studied fencing—was saying in the most reasonable conversational tone, “… Might simply have asked before throwing it away, that’s all I’m claiming, and it seems to me if either of us has a right to be peeved… “
Peeved, he says, thought Doyle desperately as he finally got a bind on the elusive blade and twisted it out of the bemused man’s grip.