“Throughout the newly christened Holy Crowley Empire, shall go out this inflexible decree: No moth upon any of the Emperor’s lands shall be harmed or in any way or method encumbered with stress or demands beyond its natural life cycle due to the afflictions of Man. Those who provide succor for moths—food, shelter—shall be exempt from property taxes for a period of one year, with reduced taxes thereafter. Penalty for noncompliance shall include seizure of lands, imprisonment, or immediate decapitation without resuscitation.”
—Handwritten by demi-mages on large signs nailed to trees or attached to stakes in the ground, in Germany, Poland, Spain, and the outskirts of Prague
Wretch looked battered and worn, while Crowley felt fluttery. So very wispy and fluttery and he felt “thous” and “thees” in his throat like he had to cough them up, and he did not know why. He pulsed and flexed his soft, feathery wings, there on the platform of the war elephant and wondered what had happened to Wretch. It was perhaps better than wondering what had happened to himself.
“I killed Jonathan Lambshead,” he said to Wretch.
“We didn’t find a body.”
“I vaporized him all right. Epic battle, but I vanquished him.”
What Crowley remembered most clearly was that intolerable pocketknife snipping his ear, crawling all over him, until he’d managed to fling it from him. But also: inflicting terrible damage on the insufferable Lambshead boy, even if, surprise, the boy had hidden powers of deflection. Something had not just pushed him back, but moved through him and past him, seeking him in other manifestations.
Namely what he was linked to, like his battle elephant and the salamanders, and he’d had to block this intrusion, if with difficulty.
His own body had been vaporized, and the explosion of their clashing magics had sent him, his head, tumbling forehead over neck through the air, only for him to land in the crook of some oak branches high in the canopy, in a most undignified position staring out through the mist, which had begun to clear. Battered, bruised, but still alive or undead. Whatever Wretch’s process had done to him.
He had been there for several hours before Wretch found him—and from his vantage and the cries of panic and surprise gurgling in the throats of demi-mages, the sudden wavelike surges of Emissaries in retreat (how was that possible!)—and took the evidence to mean that the mist had been part of an attack by the Czechs. It was difficult through the foliage, and with wood ants finding his nasal passages a wonderland, for Crowley to concentrate for too long. Especially because of the pain in his head, but further details did, during this prolonged vacation, become clear.
Several war elephants glimpsed in collage through the foliage no longer appeared operational. Some appeared to be slumped over, as if they’d fallen halfway into pits. In the middle distance, meanwhile, he could not be heard in warning from so high up and mist-muffled, as he observed the very moss beneath some of his common foot soldiers’ feet open up and the treacherous Czechs hidden beneath pull them down into concealed trenches. Worse, right beneath his perch, requiring eyestrain to see from the downward periphery, there was enacted a conflict drama in which several huge, burly Czech men and women managed to render dead one of the smaller mecha-crocodiles, by application of hammer blows.
Mercifully, Wretch swept in then on ragged wings, an evil, smoldering look in his eyes, and, without a word, plucked him from his crook and airlifted him out of that place and back to the war elephant.
There had then been an extended period of unconsciousness, after which Crowley had woken up on the platform, feeling light and airy and not himself. He had not had the courage to try to look down at whatever new body Wretch had provided for him. But he was thankful Wretch hadn’t yet summoned boring old Charlemagne.
“Is it bad?” Crowley asked. “Are we in retreat?”
He recalled seeing from above a half-dozen elephants smoldering, locked in place, singed around the edges, broken, the wheels frozen or blown off, splintered, useless. There was a gash in the side of their own elephant, and much to Crowley’s distress, the salamanders had leaked out, disappearing into the cold, the whole system upset, diminished, short-circuited. Demi-mages distracted by Czech sappers.
Wretch sighed. “No. We just … I … did not expect, well, a beer mist that was also a truth serum and cover for an attack.”
Magic was like the air force. Eventually, you had to send in the ground troops. Crowley had no idea where this thought came from; it seemed in part his but also not his.
“What have we lost?” Perhaps if he kept saying “we,” Wretch would be more kindly disposed toward his counsel.
“Some mecha-elephants are now small fortresses and will never move again. A large number of mecha-crocodiles have gone to their maker. The Emissaries will need to be gathered and herded back here; something the Czechs did gave them a fright and they are scattered throughout the forest and some seem no longer to recognize our own soldiers as friends. Our supply lines back to Germany are all cut for now, but for one, and small bands of very annoying and determined Czechs hold those roads.”
Wretch spoke in a weary way, as if shocked that he had to think about situations he had never envisioned coming to pass. Which made it all the more curious that Charlemagne would not yet be on the platform.
“Anything else?”
“Ruth Less has given up to us a friend of Jonathan Lambshead as prisoner and disappeared.”
Clearly, Wretch didn’t like having to tell Crowley this.
“When you say disappeared …”
“For good, I think. One of the demi-mages brought me a severed tentacle he said she called her ‘letter of resignation.’ ”
Where would Ruth Less get the idea for a letter of resignation? The world was odder sometimes than Crowley cared to dwell on, so he didn’t. Besides, he’d never cared for Ruth Less. Who cared if she’d gone off somewhere. Care was overrated. Care could go off and—
“What have we gained?” Crowley asked.
“The prisoner. Currently in the fade pens. Plus some of the sappers and one Czech magician who keeps turning into a frog to thwart our questioning. We also destroyed the staging ground for the mist and have established an outer perimeter closer to Prague.”
“Anything else?”
“Latrine has arrived with a few Paris demi-mages and four carts of rabid animals. I have put him in charge of the fade pens for now.”
“Well, that’s something.”
And it was. Good old Latrine. Crowley supposed he should start calling him Lautrémont again. Or maybe not. “What do we do next?”
“We’re still a mighty force. We still will prevail.”
Wretch said these words in a perfunctory way that frightened Crowley. Much as he might plot against Wretch and hate Wretch, the awful, terrible, gut-churning thought occurred that without Wretch, Crowley was nothing. Less than nothing—he’d be dead in a month, or overthrown. Or both.
The Lambshead boy’s burst of wild magic had knocked some sense into his head, had been good for him. He could see that now. The universe was very dangerous, and he’d been pompous, vain, and narrow-minded. Would he rather be back in his old place, unable to work magic, or serving Wretch in this world and helping conquer it?
“Crowley, I need a favor,” Wretch said, and Crowley noted the tone of respect and also of intimacy, almost as if trying to indicate … friendship? Or comradery?
“What is it?”
“I need you to unbind the Emissaries with our German forces and also those in Spain and Poland. We need a bit of chaos in those places where uprisings are imminent.”
Crowley bit his tongue until it bled a little and he could taste salt. He would need to do that a lot going forward, for his first impulse had been to say, “Oh, now you need me, you bollocky clumsy bat. You horrifying blood-recycling fiend.”
“It will take a little time, but by nightfall, it shall be done,” Crowley replied.
“And I will need you to take a more hands-on approach to the mechanics of our war effort. You now have a wealth of experience available to you. Courtesy of the magic of my master.”
“I’ve always thought you served a higher power, or a lower power,” Crowley said, and there was a tingle of excitement. Perhaps his claustrophobia in the elephant had also been about a diminishment in the stinging, lashing excitement of the new. Nothing new had happened for ages, not after the initial adrenaline rush of a new world, new power, and, then, so many new bodies and so many beheadings. For if Crowley were honest, much of his behavior also came out of sheer boredom, of how the world turned gray if not roiled up and pushed into motion.
“I have found the ultimate solution to your conflict with Charlemagne,” Wretch said. “I have given you his body, and his spirit now exists within you, in specific his military expertise.”
This should have been unsettling, but perhaps too much had already happened for Crowley to be too thrown by the news.
His fluttery-ness had a purpose. He had a purpose. He looked down at his perfect new body: the sumptuous and quietly gorgeous cloak of moth wings. How from his head now sprang feathery antennae. How in addition to wings he still retained arms and legs and torso. How he could see like a moth through his human eyes if so wished.
How Charlie Mange was no more.
How the “thees” and “thous” resolved in the back of his skull into a distant shadow of military maps and calculations about use of force and the proper length of supply lines and when to use calvary. Melding seamless with the man who knew very little about any of this.
He’d gotten Charlie Mange in the end, by becoming Charlemagne, in a way.
“Think of it as residue,” Wretch said. “Soon enough, what you feel won’t even be like a separate person inside you, but just part of your mind. Trust me, I know.”
And for a moment, in the haunted look Wretch gave him, Crowley saw not the hideous bat eyes, but the eyes of another looking out, far distant and already receding.
“Perhaps now,” Crowley said, “we must needs redefine this relationship. I am not my master, you no familiar. But neither are you my ruler. Shall we stand side by side, bound by dark magic?” Aware his syntax was infected by Charlemagne, but there it was. He was a changed man. Or somewhat changed. He wondered idly if he would lay eggs soon.
Wretch nodded. “Side by side it is.”
Who knew if he meant it or was lying, but some semblance of equality was enough for Crowley now.
He stared out at the hillside of Prague, some miles distant, frowned.
“What is that?”
For upon the hillside, near the old fortress, to the west of it, there now floated the most peculiar large building, transparent, shifting, so that it was at some times like a fortress itself, others like a château, and then indescribable in the crenellations and other building styles. But, throughout, it remained a vibrant, glowing … pink … as it hovered and rotated in place.
“What is that? What in all the hells is that?”
Wretch cursed in a language apparently composed of sharp sticks driven into exploding eyeballs.
“The Château Peppermint Blonkers.”
“Is it a joke? Some kind of Czech joke?”
“No, Crowley. It is not a joke. It is yet another complication. To deal with in its time.”
Crowley nodded. More and more had become clear to him. Thoughts of last stands and heroic counterattacks flickered through his moth-mind.
“We must find the Golden Sphere.” He had never said it with such force. He had never meant it so completely. If it took burning Prague to the ground and fighting to the last demi-mage, he must have the Golden Sphere. It was the only way forward.
“Yes, this is true, Crowley,” Wretch said, but the urgency in his voice had another source. “But for now, come quickly, it is time to meet my master. It is even more important that you understand all.”
Crowley nodded. The Charlemagne inside him understood. The man who reacted in haste to each new thing soon ended in ruin. He’d known for a long time Wretch couldn’t be acting alone. Wretch, his un-familiar.
“Lead the way, my dear Wretch,” Crowley said.
Wretch nodded and rose in a great flapping of leathery wings, while Crowley followed in a silent and abiding glory of silky soft flight that so gently lapped the air that there was no sound at all, and this was the most glorious thing of all: to make no sound as you traveled through the world, to be so part of the sky that it was as if you were the sky.
The euphoria was unbearable and unending.
And so they ascended into the circling flock of Wretches above, and then, through them, into the circling black-red demon hole in the sky, and as that swirling portal of the unknown took them, Crowley still reveled in the softness of his new self and recoiled at the thought of ever again taking fully human form.
Even as Crowley wondered why so many of his demi-mages down below had odd-shaped shadows and some of them had shadows moving of their own accord.