Christopher Golden - The Nimble Man

Conan Doyle sits across from Sanguedolce. He says nothing by way of introduction. They have never met, but still they know one another.

"You're a fool," Sanguedolce says, voice dripping with venom.

"What?" Conan Doyle demands, taken aback.

"Languishing in memories, in the comfort of the past," Sanguedolce explains. "You can't afford the luxury."

All other sound in the Three Goats' Heads is abruptly silenced. The smoke thickens, becomes a wall of gray, and their small table is nearly in darkness. Beyond the table, things move in the smoke, and Conan Doyle is certain that they are not the patrons of the bar, not thick-necked men in dark Derbys, but others. Things that move in shadow, thrive in it, even consume it.

He has been drifting inside himself. Lost. Sanguedolce is right. He is a fool. But somehow, despite it all, he has found the arch mage's mind, touched him. Even now Lorenzo's face shimmers and blurs. Morrigan's power interferes, as do the spells Sanguedolce used to hide himself, so long ago. Conan Doyle brushes a hand through the air, clearing some of the strange ash that hangs there, and he can see Sanguedolce more clearly.

For the moment.

"Quickly, then," Conan Doyle snaps, angry at himself, angry at Sweetblood. "Talk. What is Morrigan's plan? What does she want you for?"

"Idiot," Sanguedolce says. "I was hidden for a reason."

The arch mage draws back his hand to strike, but it never touches Conan Doyle. The smoke and ash coalesce around them and Sanguedolce seems a part of it, now, gray shadows enveloping him, erasing him.

"No!" Conan Doyle cries. "Wait!"

"This is not my doing. There is too much darkness between us, too much power."

But his voice sounds distant, muffled, and diminishing with each word. Then…

"Here." And a hand thrusts out of the smoke gray shadow, a fingertip touching Conan Doyle's forehead, a light tap just between the eyes.

Slivers of pain lance through his head. His eyes burn. Bile rises in the back of his throat. Images erupt in his mind. Flashes of color, accompanied by the shrieking of children and the agonized wail of mothers. A city on fire. A highway lined with the dead. A barricade built of rotting, festering corpses. Charred flesh falling like snow from a dead black sky. Holes in the world, craters where entire nations had once been. A small, grinning girl with a bloody mouth and sharp teeth, looking up at her father with a knife in one hand and her mother's eyes in the other.

Armies, marching.

Disease on the wind. Red welts and yellow blisters, a crowd dropping one by one, like wheat beneath the scythe.

And from the darkest corners of the world, hideous beasts begin to emerge. Demons. And worse.

"My Lord," Conan Doyle whispers. "Morrigan doesn't have this kind of power. What does she call?"

Now he feels himself choking on the smoke, the gray shadows sheathing his eyes, smothering him, crawling up his nostrils. Conan Doyle passes a hand before him and the gray withdraws only enough that he can see the outline of a face in the smoke. The lips move, but Sanguedolce's voice is in his head, not in the smoke.

"You don't listen. This isn't Morrigan's plan. But she has already corrupted the sorcery of my chrysalis. My power is already seeping, drawing attention. It must be sealed again. The things you have seen.. they are inevitable unless you can stop her… if I am freed, this is the fate of the world."

Conan Doyle is cloaked in gray smoke again. Once more, furiously, he waves it away, but this time when it clears he is at his table at the Three Goats' Heads, and he is alone.

And he awakens.

The wind whipped Danny Ferrick's face with such ferocity that tears stung his eyes. It tugged at his clothing like ghost fingers and he felt himself spun around, feet dangling uselessly beneath him, a scarecrow in a hurricane. It was all blackness and wind, save for brief glimpses through the dark, eyeblink windows on the world, none of which offered the same view as the last. He squeezed his eyes closed.

A hard gust blew him upward, and as he floated downward again he felt solid ground beneath his feet. A spiral breeze kept him from stumbling. He opened his eyes upon a dark room. The curtains fluttered in the traveling wind and his hair was ruffled a moment longer, and then the breeze died, and all was silence in the room save for the settling of dust upon the wooden floor.

The canopy of the four-poster bed was the same ivory as the curtains. The carved wood of those posts was bone-white. A long bureau was against the far wall and a fireplace, dark and cold, was set into another. Other than these, the room was featureless, with no sign of any occupant. There were no lamps, no mirrors, no books or brushes, and only a single pillow on the bed.

Unless something had gone wrong, this was Mr. Doyle's house. Danny figured it was a spare bedroom, because it certainly did not seem as though anyone lived here. But… He frowned, glancing around the room. The door was firmly closed. He had followed Ceridwen here, let himself be swept along in the wake of her magic. So where the hell was she?

The darkness of the room felt comfortable to him, as though it was a robe he had slipped on. His eyes had always adjusted well to the dark. Danny moved soundlessly across the room and opened the door just wide enough to peer through, and pressed an eye to the crack. The room he was in was at the end of the hall, and the corridor outside the door only a wing. There were five other doors, two on the left and three on the right, and then a left turn. It was dark, but where the corridor turned there was a glimmer of distant light, perhaps from a room around the corner.

Ceridwen's shadow was on the wall at the end of the corridor, thrown by the glow of that dim light.

With no sign of anyone else, Danny slipped out of the room and pulled the door softly shut behind him. His nostrils flared and he smelled blood in the house. Somewhere. And it wasn't human blood. His forked tongue slid over sharp rows of teeth and he felt his lips pull up into a kind of smile, as if he had no control over his response to that scent at all. Then he realized that it wasn't a smile. It was a snarl.

Danny moved in silence through the dark corridor, still wrapped in shadows. He felt invisible. He had always been good at hide and seek as a child, always had an uncanny ability to sneak up on others unawares. For the first time he realized this was not an ordinary thing. He cloaked himself in darkness and slipped quietly down the hall, and this time when he smiled to himself it was genuine.

At the end of the hall he peeked around the corner, remaining out of sight, and when he saw Ceridwen he caught his breath.

This new corridor was far longer and halfway down its length was a balustrade, and a stairwell that came down from above and continued on toward the first floor. Danny had no idea what floor they were on now. The dim light upon the walls was from somewhere below. At the landing, just beside the stairs, were two creatures unlike anything Danny had seen before. They were stooped, hands twisted into claws, long talons dangling by their knees. Their skin was leathery brown and rutted with lines that might have been scars or wrinkles or grooves in tree bark. And yet he had the idea that if they stood up straight and hid their faces, they might have been able to walk the daylight world and pass as human.

Just the way Danny did.

But he would have seen them for what they were. He would have smelled them. They had the stink of raw meat and sewer on them, these things. Danny had heard enough from Conan Doyle and the others to know they had to be the Night People. The Corca Duibhne. Seeing them made him tremble, but not with fear. He shook with the urge to kill them.

Ceridwen was in the hall as well, only ten or twelve feet from the Night People. The ice blue sphere atop her staff glowed softly. Danny could not help but notice the way her long limbs moved beneath the sheer fabric of her dress. She was breathtaking. Her whole self seemed illuminated by the same ice blue light that glowed within that sphere.