The Carnival of Deepest Desire, Part 3
Escapes and Traps
This serial is a sequel to North of Midnight. Carnival of Deepest Desire can be read as a standalone, but if you’d like to read North of Midnight first, click the button below.
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“I can offer myself in payment for Khalid,” said Shar. “But I cannot offer you anyone else.”
“She is all I will accept for payment,” replied the Dulluhan, still speaking through his severed head. One of his gray, dead fingers pointed right at me. “If you will not give her to me, I will just keep Khalid.”
“What about this amulet?” I asked pointed to the silver necklace I was wearing as I tried to remember what I’d been told about it. “Inside is an arrowhead crafted by Hephaestus himself and four-times blessed—by Helios, Hestia, Eros, and even the Archangel Raphael. You can’t tell me that kind of item is common.”
“It isn’t,” said the Dulluhan. “But there aren’t a lot of my customers looking for protection against evil. Now if you happen to have anything that provides protection against good—”
“Don’t any collectors ever visit you? Surely, someone would pay well for an article so rare?”
“If I could find the right buyer,” replied the Dulluhan in a grudging tone. “That might take a day…or a year…or a century. You I could sell within the hour.”
While he was talking, I glanced in Khalid’s general direction. He looked less panicked now, which was odd. I’d seen enough of him to suspect that he wouldn’t want me to sell myself to save him. I wasn’t an adopted sibling like Shar, but Khalid, young as he was, seemed morally mature enough to reject the idea of anyone else taking his place. And my negotiations to substitute the amulet, the only other alternative, weren’t going well.
So why did Khalid now look almost hopeful?
He shifted slightly on the phooka’s back, and the creature snorted blue flames again. Khalid stopped whatever he was doing, but I could see that he was still moving slightly.
He must have a plan of some kind. Maybe I could buy him the time he needed to try it.
“We have two of those amulets,” I said, pointing to Carlos. “Only one person has the raw materials needed to make more. It’s hard to believe that they won’t fetch a good price.”
Carlos subtly shifted his position, moving marginally closer to Khalid. If the Dulluhan noticed, he said nothing about it. His attention still seemed to be on me.
“Though Khalid is a half djinn, his magic is rather limited,” said Shar. “Are you really going to tell me he’s more valuable than the amulets?”
“There are always buyers for master thieves,” replied the Dulluhan. His severed head now looked a little bored. “Besides, from what I hear, you folks have plenty of enemies. There are many who would buy him just to use him as leverage against you—or perhaps to kill him in some horrible way just to get revenge.” The severed head smiled.
My fists clenched. If not for Khalid’s precarious position, I would have been tempted to run at the Dullahan and thrust my sword right into the severed head’s face.
At that moment, Khalid’s ropes fell away as he jumped off the phooka’s back and disappeared into the shadows. The severed head’s eyes widened in surprise. Evidently, the Dulluhan hadn’t realized that a thief and an escape artist have much in common.
“Find him!” the Dulluhan yelled to the phooka, who was already turning in the direction I thought Khalid had gone.
Shar and Carlos were already in motion. Shar darted toward the Dulluhan, and Carlos, with a battle cry, charged at the phooka. I hesitated for a moment, wondering which one might need my help more.
Red Cap ran in between Shar and the Dulluhan, trying to block Shar’s move with his oversized pike. Shar cut through it with a single sword stroke, accompanied as before by emerald sparks. Red Cap dropped what was left of the pike and threw himself at Shar, who shoved him out of the way, sending him crashing to the ground with a loud thud.
I thought the phooka, fast as it was, might just run after Khalid and ignore Carlos. Instead, it reared, no doubt trying to smash its hooves into Carlos. He dodged the first attempt, but the phooka charged him, nostrils flaring. It didn’t have much distance to build up momentum, though. Carlos dodged again—and wounded the phooka with his sword as the creature passed by. It cried out in pain as blood poured from its front left leg, and the smell of sulfur increased.
Shar fended off another snap of the Dulluhan’s spine whip, cutting more of it off in the process. The Dulluhan decided now would be a good time for a strategic retreat—but horses pulling a coach can’t put themselves into reverse the way cars can. As they turned, Shar slashed their harnesses with surgical precision, breaking their connection with the bone coach on which the Dulluhan rode. Unlike regular horses, the Dulluhan’s skull-headed team didn’t just panic and run off, though. Instead, they turned on Shar, seeking to trample him under their hooves.
I ran in Shar’s direction. Six to one—or even six to two—didn’t look like great odds. But the horses, with their unrealistic anatomies, seemed much more like magic constructs than living creatures. All Shar need to do was nick them with Zom to disrupt the power animating them, at least for a moment. Even had their movements not stopped, the way their candleflame eyes flickered out would have been a dead giveaway.
Apparently knowing a losing battle when he saw one, the Dulluhan started the wheels of his coach moving without the aid of his horses. Shar started to follow but quickly discovered that his attacks had caused the magic animating them to stall momentarily, not disintegrate completely. Their eyes relit a few seconds after Shar’s blade withdrew from them. He had to do more damage before he could afford to ignore them.
Despite being outnumbered, Shar seemed to have the horses handled, so I ran after the relatively slow moving coach. It accelerated slightly, but I was a good runner, and I managed to keep up. The unnerving darkness all around me that affected even my magic senses was more of a nuisance than the coach’s increasing speed.
I did catch glimpses of poorly lit carnival booths as I ran, but I couldn’t see much detail. Nor did I see any sign of other…beings, though it stood to reason that there had to be some around. Surely, this whole carnival, even if it was only a facade for a black market, couldn’t have been put in place just for us.
After a short time, I realized that the Dulluhan must be trying to wear me down. If I tried to run faster the coach accelerated to match, keeping it always just out of reach, but despite the darkness, never out of sight. The dull bones from which it was made glowed in a way I had the feeling he could have extinguished if he wanted to.
My breath was coming in short, ragged gasps. How long had I been running? I wasn’t sure. I tried sensing Shar and Carlos—or at least Zom, which must have had a unique magic signature—but I had no luck. They were lost in the darkness just like everything else around me that was more than a few feet away. Only the coach was truly visible.
It came to a halt so abrupt that I nearly slammed into it. The Dulluhan turned in my direction, and his severed head smiled again—an expression that would live forever in the nightmares.
“Well, it looks as if I won’t need to bargain for you after all,” he said. “I can just take you now, without any need for tiresome haggling.
I had assumed that Red Cap was the name of a singular being, but out of the shadows stepped dozens of red caps, each pointing their overly long pikes at me.
I had no idea which direction to run to get back to Shar and Carlos. Not that it mattered. Red caps appeared out of the shadows behind me as well as in front of me.
There was no way I could escape.
“The Carnival of Deepest Desire” is related to the Spell Weaver series. (The action takes place between the sixth and seventh books, just after the end of “North of Midnight.”)
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