The time for talk being through, Bartido acted like lightning. His hands whipped out of his pockets, clenched around the necks of the two bulbous flasks he’d been carrying there. He’d been half-convinced that Dundee wouldn’t go quietly, and the thought of facing off against the master magician had led him to make preparations.
He was fairly sure that Dundee had let him go on as long as he had out of pragmatic confidence: accusing the Proseccos was one thing, but the necromancer had wanted to know just how far Bartido had gotten in his investigation. It would be fairly stupid, after all, to reveal his involvement if Bartido didn’t know about it. He’d been cautious, too, sketching out the Rune with the tip of his cane even while listening to Bartido explain his deductions, but he’d still waited until Bartido had openly threatened him with arrest to kindle it, rather than making a surprise attack.
It was the confidence born from master, of knowing that he vastly outclassed Bartido in the magical arts. Any general welcomed the chance to be able to fall back on overwhelming force.
Bartido hurled the two flasks in quick succession. Like any master of his ability, Dundee was warded against physical attack. The flasks shattered, smashed by concussive force from his wards—and spilling out their contents.
Alchemy wasn’t like the other kinds of magic. Among other things, it was impossible to enchant a talisman to call up a previously summoned and bound familiar because Alchemy familiars weren’t summoned at all, but created outright. It was impossible to take a shortcut for a path that didn’t exist.
That didn’t mean, though, that an alchemist anticipating a fight couldn’t create familiars in advance. Each of the ceramic flasks had contained a blob, the most basic life form Alchemy could create. They had no fixed form, being just a ball of viscous green goo. The blobs hit the floor, flattening slightly on impact, then swelled back up and spat clumps of their substance at Dundee.
Even as the blobs were acting, Bartido was already driving his left elbow into the belly of Vine Petri. He flinched a little as he did it, but Dundee hadn’t apparently considered warding his apprentice to be a worthwhile use of time and mana, and the girl wasn’t skilled enough to do it herself. She was still choking for breath and recovering from the shock when Bartido’s uppercut made her teeth click together and she went over onto her back from the blow.
“Bastard!” Prosecco shouted in rage and launched himself at Bartido. He figured that settled the question of whether he was Vine’s father; the kind of man who played con games on elderly couples didn’t tend to get offended over an enemy’s lack of chivalry. His science, however, did not match his anger; he launched a wild roundhouse swing that Bartido easily weaved out of the way of before snapping a quick jaw to his face and following up with a couple of quick body blows.
The blobs’ attempt to use their ability to slow Dundee by gumming up his movements had failed due to his wards, but Bartido had one turn on Prosecco, the sticky goo taking the spiritualist almost completely out of the fight.
Dundee, however, was definitely not out of the fight. When the blobs’ attempts had failed, he’d retreated to the fartherst wall of the room, and in a quick movement he twisted the knob off the top of his cane. A shake of his hand spilled glittering silver nails out onto the floor and from each sprang a phantom. A half-dozen of the lethal ghost knights suddenly stood between Bartido and his quarry.
“Did you really think that you were going to stop me with an alchemist’s tricks and your bare fists? Please. There is a difference between confidence and folly.”
The phantoms surged forward. Like the golems in Argyle’s building, the blobs were helpless against the Astral ghost-knights. Dundee’s Rune was shining as it brought on another summoning, while Madame Prosecco was busy scribing a Rune of her own.
“Yeah, actually, I did.”
Bartido snapped his fingers, and the curtains were flung open. Four fairies swooped into the room, firing their bows at the squad of phantoms. The ghostly warriors whirled to meet these new opponents, their instinct for battle momentarily overcoming their master’s order. The ceiling was low; the fairies could not escape the swordsmens’ range and their agility was no proof against the surprising speed the phantoms showed. Regardless of Glamour’s advantage against Necromancy, the master’s powerfully enhanced familiars were too much for the fairies to handle.
One fairy was struck dead-on by a flaming sword, swatted from the sky like an insect. It vanished, retreating to Faerie to avoid its death; serious injury released it from the summoning contract. It was plain that the others would soon follow.
But the fairies were not the only familiars that Bartido had brought with him—or rather, that Carstairs had brought in his carriage after Bartido had summoned them. The homunculus was slower, having to totter along on its stumpy legs instead of flying, but as soon as it entered the room it unleashed a bolt of psychic energy that exploded in the midst of the phantoms, crackling and sparkling.
Enhanced they might have been; Dundee’s phantoms could probably have brought down a dragon in under a minute. It was no defense against the psychic storm. The exorcism was complete in seconds, and all six phantoms had vanished.
In the next instant, a phantom of Bartido’s own appeared from the overturned table. The Rune there was, after all, basically a Hades Gate, despite the tinkering with its ghosts, and Bartido had set it to summoning a ghost knight right from the first.
With a snarl, Dundee hurled the silver ball to the floor. Not only had it contained the phantom nails, but it seemed the ball was itself a talisman. Two more familiars appeared, their form ghastly. These were not immaterial ghosts, but in human shape, withered corpses with the skin stretched so tight over the bones to make them seem skeletal. They wore tattered rags, their arms bound behind them, the nooses by which they had died dangling still from their throats. They were skullmages, magicians executed long ago for their practice of evil magic, and they still retained their arts.
Bartido’s fairies swooped at the skullmages, firing arrows, but they were not in time. Chittering bones rattled, the mages’ jaws sagged open, and they spat out bolts of pale blue magic. The phantom was a sitting duck; it was destroyed before it could do anything at all.
A moment later, Dundee completed his own summoning. His Rune had been Acheron, and the entity summoned was not another undead spirit but a Charon, the ferryman that carried the spirits of the dead to the afterlife.
Despite its fearsome appearance, the Charon was not quite the grim reaper that it appeared. As a ferryman, its primary purpose was to transport other familiars who didn’t have its freedom or speed of movement, bearing a squad of demons, even dragons, into the heart of the enemy formation unhindered by walls or barricades. But they had no attack of their own, other than to discharge the life force of one of their passengers as a bolt of mana, sacrificing a familiar to deliver a devastating attack.
Behind it, one of the skullmages used its ability to astralize targets to render a fairy vulnerable to its companion’s magic. That left only two fairies, and it was likely they wouldn’t endure long enough to carry the day. Dundee knew it, too; the Charon reached back with its scythe and touched one of the skullmages, bearing it aboard its boat. There was no point in ferrying it anywhere; that skullmage was ammunition, like a crossbow bolt with Bartido’s name on it that the Charon could bring wherever he tried to run if he couldn’t stop it.
The Charon was Astral; another psychic storm could hurt it badly, but Bartido wasn’t sure if the fairies could finish it off while dealing with the skullmages, and the homunculus didn’t have the mana to fire more than one. He didn’t like his chances in a casting duel with Dundee, to say nothing of what Madame might come up with.
He made his decision.
“Michael, stop her!” Bartido yelled, pointing at the furiously scribing medium. He sent mana to his own Rune, trying to call up another phantom, and at the same time issued a command to his homunculus. The haze of clairvoyance settled over the room, linking the physical realm to the flows of mana, and making Astral creatures vulnerable.
The instant the clairvoyance took effect, the blobs fired, their sticky goo splattering the now-physical Charon and inhibiting its movements.
But that would only slow it, not stop it.
Bartido sprang forward, darting alongside the struggling Charon, brushing past the skullmage, and launched himself into a flying tackle, praying as he did that Dundee’s wards had been spent staving off the thrown vials and the blobs’ subsequent attacks. His shoulder hit the older man in the midsection, his arms wrapped around Dundee’s waist, and he drove the master magician into the floor.
Adrenaline sang in Bartido’s blood as he barely even took conscious notice of his escape from harm. He was already in motion, rearing up above Dundee, left hand on the necromancer’s breastbone, holding him down, while his right fist raised and fell, driving like a hammer full into Dundee’s face with fury and desperation. Once, twice, three times he hit the old man. If the necromancer was still conscious when the Charon managed to turn itself around, one thought would be all it would take to end Bartido’s life.
But after the second punch, Dundee’s eyes had rolled up in his head and he’d sagged limply to the rug, so that the third blow was just icing on the cake. Bartido sighed with relief; that should give him time to destroy Dundee’s remaining familiars and Rune before he woke up and issued new commands, and the spiritualists weren’t likely to—
He hadn’t quite finished the thought when pain exploded through the side of his head, just behind the right ear, and he was knocked sprawling off of Dundee’s body.
“Bastard!” Prosecco screamed again. Dazed, Bartido watched him step over Dundee, dripping goo and slime from the dissolving remnants of the blob’s attack. “Do you know how long we’ve worked on this? Nearly a year’s worth of planning and preparation, plus six months of patient effort, building up our clientele and reputation! And you... And now you come along and smash it all to bits in a week?”
Some part of Bartido’s mind knew that he should be doing...something. But what? He couldn’t focus, couldn’t quite grasp the thought that he needed through the haze of pain. He saw Prosecco draw his foot back, knowing what was coming but unable to do anything to stop it.
The pointed toe of the spiritualist’s boot slammed into Bartido’s gut, and pain exploded through him. He curled reflexively around the injury, and saw the other man raise his foot again, this time no doubt for a brutal stomp.
The only thing that stopped him was Victoria Laird hitting him with a chair. The blow fell on Prosecco’s left side and sent him staggering; he barely got his foot down to catch his balance. As the heavy chair sagged to the floor, though, he came back, backhanding her across the face and sending her reeling away.
Victoria’s gasp of pain was like a dash of cold water through Bartido’s mind, driving out the haze. With everything he could gather, he lunged upwards, burying his fist in Prosecco’s solar plexus. The spiritualist fell back, gagging, and though Bartido’s head swam when he tried to get up from his knees, he didn’t have to. The ability for coherent thought was enough; he commanded the nearest blob to act, and once more Prosecco found himself splattered with sticky, gumlike ooze. He tried to counterattack, but his movements were so slowed he looked like a street performer putting on some kind of act of a man in slow motion. Even that was quickly put to a stop when Will Laird stepped up and knocked him flat.
“That’s for hitting my sister, you damned fraud!”
Looking over at his last functional adversary, Bartido saw that Carstairs had wrested the wand away from Addeline Prosecco, and had her sit back down in the chair. He considered cracking a joke about the Knights of the Nascent Dawn crusading for God against sorcerers, but his head hurt too much to bother.
Besides, he’d probably just point out she’s a necromancer and miss the point entirely.
He chose instead to look over at Victoria, who was rubbing at the red mark on her cheek.
“Are you all right?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Once we get these people into the hands of the law, I can summon an elf to heal that for you. I know at least that much Glamour.”
“I’d appreciate it. It doesn’t really bother me, but it might make people ask some awkward questions if I attended a dinner party with a bruised face.”
“It’s the least I could do, after you saved my neck.”
Victoria smiled at him.
“Really, it’s not a problem. I have a younger brother, after all, so I’m used to pulling boys out of scrapes.”
Slowly, Bartido got to his feet. He only swayed a little, which he supposed was a good sign.
“Consigned to ‘little brother’ status, then, am I?”
“Well, maybe not quite like that.”
“Please, Bartido, must you stand there flirting at a time like this?” Carstairs cut in.
“You’re right. Will, could you go outside and tell Michael’s driver to go to the magistrate’s court and fetch a group of runners to make the arrest? I’m not handing these folks over to the local Charlies, that’s for certain.”
“His driver? But his carriage left an hour ago.”
“He should be right up the street. Where do you think all those familiars came from? I put a Fairy Ring on the carriage roof, a Laboratory on the floor, and summoned them before I went to join you. Then Michael brought them along, so I’d have a little surprise ready for Dundee and his cohorts.”
Without Dundee to direct them, the last familiars had been easily mopped up. A blob’s gum-drop had slowed the last skullmage enough so that the fairies could finish it off without incident, and the summoning of Bartido’s second phantom had finished in time for it to help deal with the Charon, a task made easier by the homunculus recovering enough mana to use another psychic storm.
“And he was willing to do all this? That’s a lot to ask from a jarvey.”
Bartido shrugged.
“He was paid for his trouble. And I doubt many jarveys would argue with a carriage full of a magician’s familiars.”
“Good point.” Will headed for the door.
“Victoria, could you help us? We need to get these four tied and ready for the police so we don’t have to fight them all over again, but Vine and Madame are both necromancers and we need to make sure they aren’t carrying any talismans they could use to effect escape, so we need to remove rings, hairpins, coin-purses, really any personal possessions. I think it would be better if another woman made the search.”
“Chivalry didn’t stop you from knocking Miss Petri out.”
“I’ll do what I have to do to win a fight against an enemy, and I’m not going to treat a magician as if she’s less dangerous just because she’s a woman. That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to follow common decency if I’m allowed to.”
“I see. Well, in that case, I’d be glad to help. After all, it’ll keep your hands off this henna-haired witch.”
The look of contempt Victoria gave to the unconscious Vine was the icing on the cake for a very satisfied Bartido.