Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(28)

I stepped into the space, felt the earth replenish me, and set myself in an aikido stance. The shroud of ghouls saw the challenge and charged me.

Not for the first time, I wished ghouls were truly undead, like vampires. If that were the case, I could simply unbind them back to their component elements. But ghouls were living creatures, a human variant now mutated into a dead end, har de har har. Back when I was a much younger man—in the second century or so—an idiot wizard somewhere in Arabia had created the first ghul by summoning a demon to possess a poor young man. The demon had a taste for necrotic flesh and grew stronger by it, forcing the host to gorge on bodies that the wizard provided. Eventually the wizard realized he’d made a horrible mistake—perhaps because he was getting tired of procuring bodies—and exorcised the demon. He didn’t realize that the man was forever changed, despite the exorcism. When the wizard went to kill the man—for dead men tell no tales—he presumed him as weak as any human, only to discover that the man was quite strong indeed. Said man instead killed the wizard and escaped. Continuing to hunger for dead flesh, the man noticed that his skin was turning gray. He soon realized that if he fed that hunger on a steady basis—defiled graves and feasted on what he found—he could maintain a normal appearance and even enjoy strength beyond that of ordinary humans. His abilities—and his curse—got passed down once he married and had children. His kids were perfectly normal until they hit puberty, when they began wasting away and turning gray. At that point Daddy took them to a cemetery and said, “Here, kids—what you need is a nice corpse snack. Clotted blood! Om nom nom!”

All ghouls were descended from that common ancestor, but this particular branch of the family had clearly decided to throw in their lot with the demons that created them. They weren’t making any effort to appear human—or to charge me with a modicum of respect, considering that I’d just taken out a reaper. Their tactics seemed confined to run, leap at my throat, and roar at me.

Aikido is a discipline ideally suited to redirecting energy and using the opponent’s momentum in your favor, and it includes a training set called taninzudori, in which one practices against multiple attackers. I’d found it a refreshing twentieth-century adaptation of older styles. The ghouls, therefore, found themselves thrown or spun awkwardly behind me, where Granuaile was waiting with the scythe. Though the weapon is somewhat unwieldy, it tends to deliver mortal blows, which Granuaile distributed quickly. The last three, seeing what had happened to the rest of the shroud, reconsidered their charge and slowed down. They began to spread out in a half circle.

Meanwhile, behind me, the unbridled panic of the other carnival goers was subsiding just enough for them to start shouting questions, since they had seen us kill some bad guys and assumed we must have all the answers.

“What’s going on? Can you get us out of here? What are those things? Don’t you have a gun?”

I didn’t know how any of this would be explained to the survivors—somehow I doubted they’d believe it was a pocket of swamp gas—but first I had to ensure that there would be survivors. And I also needed to find the portal that the demons had used to get here. So far I hadn’t spotted it, but I hadn’t had the luxury of time to look around either.

I didn’t want to go on the attack, because it would leave my back open and they were set now, so I hawked up something juicy and spit at the one on my right. It landed right on his forehead, and he promptly lost his ghoulish composure. It wasn’t that he was grossed out; ghouls find far fouler substances than sputum to be quite tasty. He simply knew an insult when it smacked wetly on his face. Enraged, he lunged at me, and I tossed him at the one on the left, sending them both tumbling. That left the ghoul in the center all alone for a few seconds with no backup. I charged him and shoved my fingers into his eyes. He scratched me deeply on either side of my rib cage, burning cuts I’d have to work hard to heal, but he backed off and would never see the coup de grace coming. I grabbed one of his arms and whipped him around so that my back was to the wall of bodies, then kicked him in the chest so that he was staggering backward, where Granuaile could easily finish him. I backpedaled at the approach of the other two, who had disentangled and were coming now.

Peripherally, I saw that Granuaile had dispatched the blinded ghoul and was also advancing, coming up behind the others as Oberon bounded forward to take advantage. He nipped at the heels of the one on my left, which sent him sprawling and allowed Granuaile to catch up and end him. The last one leapt at me and I dropped onto my back and tucked my knees against my chest, catching him on my feet and then kicking him up and over my head. It threw him into the pile of bodies against the wall. He made a wet impact noise and then crunched down headfirst onto the blood-soaked floorboards. Not a kill shot, but it dazed him to the point where Granuaile could hustle over and eviscerate him. Then she dropped the scythe, exhausted.

Ragged cheers and cries of relief rose up from the Needle Gate. There were perhaps twenty people crying and clasping hands while thanking their gods and me for deliverance. I smiled and waved at them once before they all died: The Needle Gate exploded and perforated them in at least a hundred different places. Many of the needles passed completely through the people who had been stuck on the barbs of the gate and went on to sink into the flesh of people in the next rank. None of the needles reached us on the far end of the room; they’d shot off to either side or punctured the body of some hapless victim. We flinched and gasped and only then saw the cause of the explosion.