A knotty club materialized in the goat giant’s hand, and he grinned down at Chucky boy. Raising the club for a strike, the demon goat rumbled, “The Sorcerer sends his respects. Long live the king.”

But the hit didn’t come. Instead, the club disintegrated into a cloud of black powder, drifting out over the crowd in all directions. People shrieked and tried to outrun the haze, but to no avail. Only those at the doors got out. The rest merely managed to trample each other a moment before being enveloped.

The cloud reached the king and the priests, too. It even drifted down to the table, black powder settling at my feet.

Chucky boy rushed forward, wielding the ceremonial blade. A ridiculous move. The thing looked like a fancy letter opener compared to the gigantic demon goat. But he had guts. I had to give him that.

Not that guts would save him. Not against a monster like that.

Turning away from the inevitable slaughter, I surveyed the crowd. The black cloud seemed to fade almost as quickly as it materialized, leaving no trace of harm on the people it had touched. For a moment, the crowd looked as bewildered as I felt. They glanced about, surveying their neighbors, patting their own persons as if to reassure themselves that they’d escaped unscathed.

Then, all at once, they began to convulse and foam at the mouth and vomit and tear their hair out. It was the single most mortifying, most disgusting thing I’d ever seen. And I’d once watched the entire Twilight saga. An entire cathedral full of people, projectile vomiting all over each other. Ripping clumps of hair out of themselves.

I turned back to Chucky boy, unable to watch the mayhem in the seats. To my surprise, he hadn’t bought it yet. On the contrary, he was dancing circles around the monster, getting in jabs and slices at his hairy goat legs.

So far, the black mist hadn’t affected the king.

His priests weren’t so lucky, though. Big hat guy writhed on the floor, while bigger hat guy convulsed, puking all over the place.

I glanced down at the powder at my feet, wondering if I’d been just far enough out of reach, or if this was about to be my fate too.

I sure as hell hoped I’d escaped. None of this looked fun.

Still clutching the scepter, I considered my options. Hide and hope that this – whatever the hell this was – bypassed me? Make a dash for it and hope no one spotted me?

I was still making up my mind when the transformations started.

Big hat guy was the first. He stopped puking, stood, shuddered once, and then screamed. The kind of scream people mean when they say ‘hellish screams,’ but times ten. The most terrifying shit I’d ever heard. He dropped to his hands and knees, still shaking. A gray film crept up his skin, and a red light lit his eyes.

I started shaking too, from fear. I was about to piss myself, for very different reasons than a few minutes ago.

All around big hat guy, the others went through the same process. First eyes and skin. Then their bones broke with loud cracking sounds, their bodies stretching and growing. I could see knots forming under the skin as new bone matter knitted the pieces together. Their nails grew out into talons. Their hair fell out in chunks.

Then they stopped screaming and rose, twice as tall as they’d been in life – every last one of them. Every last one, that is, except Chucky boy.

He was unfazed, and hard at work slicing and dicing the goat monster. By now, it had sagged to one knee, and though it swatted at him, the attempts were feeble.

The undead – that’s what I assumed them to be, anyway – turned their attention to Chucky. The entire cathedral seemed to move at once, the great mass of inhumanity converging on his position.

I thought about leaving the shelter of my hiding place to help. It would be the noble thing to do, rather than letting him wage a doomed fight all by himself.

Noble, but moronic.

Emerging from cover wouldn’t save him. It’d just kill me.

I stayed put.

The king drove his silver blade through the demon goat’s chest, and it rasped out a shuddering, “It’s too late. You can stop me, but you will never stop him. This army will spread, and soon every corner of the realm will serve the Sorcerer. You-”

He didn’t get to finish. Chucky boy pulled the blade out of his chest, and with a leap, cut the demon’s head clean off his shoulders. An impressive feat, which I hardly would have believed possible – of either king or souped-up letter opener.

At that moment, I heard the clatter of armored feet. The cathedral doors flew open and a troop of tin cans – the colloquialism by which those of us on the wrong side of the law referred to the guards dressed from head to toe in plate armor – rushed in.

Which I took to be my cue to leave. It was one thing to hope to go unnoticed by a bunch of undead intent on regicide. It’d be a whole ‘nother deal to wait for a bunch of puffed-up heroes rushing to their king’s defense.

Exit stage left…

Creeping out from under the tablecloth, I made it exactly two crawling steps before someone – something – seized me from behind. Talons dug into my leg and I yelped, almost losing the scepter in the scramble to be free.

With a quick glance over my shoulder, I saw what it was. I hadn’t really expected anything different, and yet the sight still scared the hell out of me.

One of the undead. Specifically, bigger hat guy, his giant hat now dwarfed by his giant-er head. He lifted me by the legs, and I dangled upside down, watching in abject terror. He opened his mouth, revealing a reeking cavity full of razor-sharp teeth. A forked tongue flickered through one of the gaps between those teeth.

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“Oh fuck no,” I screamed. I’d like to say it was a cool, collected comeback, smoothly delivered and badass. Some kind of John Wick or Dirty Harry line or something.

Yeah, not so much. More like, halfway between a squeak and a yelp.

Still, I might have lost my voice, but not my senses. I was not going to become this guy’s meal. Not willingly, anyway.

I swung the only weapon I had at hand – the scepter – at his paw while reaching for the dagger strapped to my belt. I didn’t think I’d stop him, but I figured I might be able to bruise his knuckles, maybe crack a few bones. Slow him down until I could get something sharp and pointy into somewhere vital.

Not exactly how it happened. The giant diamond in the center of the scepter struck the monster’s taloned fingers, hard. But rather than bones breaking, the entire hand withered.

The hand, the arm, and the monster himself, in a flurry of screams and writhing, flailing limbs. I didn’t see the full process, as the priest’s demise left me six feet off the floor, with nothing holding me in place.

Calling on all my skills, I pivoted and twisted to ease my landing. And still ended up hitting head, knees and elbows all at once.

While I picked myself off the ground, an alert ran through my thoughts.

[Salvidora’s Curse: your sins will find you out. May this luck penalty recall your sins to mind and put your feet on the straight and narrow path.]

Not that I’d had any doubt. My agility was high enough to handle a fall like that no problem. My mishap could only be the work of the curse.

Swearing internally, I took stock of my surroundings. Where a moment before the giant priest had stood, now lay a desiccated figure no larger than a child. And a big hat.

I laughed out loud. If a little tap was all it took to end these guys, this wouldn’t be so hard after all. I glanced around, trying to find the king.

He was still alive and still kicking, surrounded by an ever-growing pile of tiny, desiccated bodies. Which might have been impressive, if I didn’t know just how easy it was to do.

That knowledge, however, made the sight at the cathedral doors a lot harder to understand. The tin cans had rushed in hacking and slashing, but they’d barely advanced at all. Their hits seemed ineffectual, as if their blades all but bounced off the undead’s leathery gray skin and scales.

Not that it changed things one way or the other for me. My primary objective remained escape. But that seemed much less likely now. The time I’d wasted with bigger hat guy had given a swarm of undead the chance to circle in behind me.

“Damn it,” I swore. And then winced, as a swift electric shock passed through the scepter. “What the hell?”

It happened again, the flash a little sharper this time. I barely retained my hold on the thing. But I didn’t have a chance to figure out the why’s or how’s. I had bad guys bearing down on me. A lot of bad guys.

With the dagger in one hand and the scepter in the other, I let into the first gray skin that came for me. The blade glanced off his leathery skin, but as with bigger hat guy, he crumpled as soon as the scepter touched him.

I figured I must have got lucky with bigger hat guy – he’d gone down with a single hit, but that clearly wasn’t the case for all of them.

A theory that the next few gray skins bore out. Some went down with a single blow, and some needed both dagger and scepter. They all died in the end, though.

Chucky boy seemed to be flying through them, his pile of pint-sized corpses doubling since the last time I looked. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it a lot better and faster than me.

Still, I couldn’t complain, given the circumstance. They went down relatively easily for me. A lot easier than the tin cans, anyway, who were dropping like flies around the cathedral doors.

Not just any kind of flies, though. Zombie flies. Because as soon as they went down, they got back up again – as gray skins, this time. Giant gray skins, in human-sized armor that suddenly looked freakishly small.

Which meant that for all me and Chucky boy cut down, new undead took their place. The very same guys who’d come to save us.

Well, come to save him, anyway.

Somehow, the onslaught seemed to be driving me toward the king. Probably, because the same bastards bearing down on me wanted a shot at him.

A few of the tin cans managed to push their way deeper into the cathedral, too. They were making a beeline for their king, probably intent on dragging him out of the chaos as soon as possible. I needed to get the hell out of Dodge, but that didn’t seem likely.

For every gray skin I killed, every tiny body that I left, two more stepped up to take its place. I stumbled backward, my foot catching on one of the corpses, and narrowly avoided skewering myself on the pointy tip of an iron finial adorning a tapestry hanging.

“Damn it,” I swore. A stab of pain shot through my hand as the scepter crackled with some kind of inexplicable energy.

I had the thought – a ridiculous thought – that the thing was responding to my language. Zapping me for cursing. Maybe it really was some kind of blessed artifact, and it didn’t like swearing.

Then, deciding I was an idiot – an idiot who was about to get his idiot head chopped off – I returned to reality. The very fucked up reality facing me at the moment.

While I’d been flirting with impalement, the gray skins swarmed me. I was surrounded on all sides, by big, ugly bastards salivating at the chance to kill me. Literally, salivating. Their jaws sagged open, their tongues lolled out, and they eyed me up the way creepy old men eye up girls at the beach.

I started my one-two slash-bash routine, and got through a few of them. But on the fourth guy, my blade bounced off his skin, and before the scepter could connect, he got in a vicious kick to the ribs. It did him no good. Two seconds later, he was dissolving into a tiny, dead version of himself.

But it left me wheezing and staggering.

“Behind you,” someone shouted.

I spun just in time to avoid a gray skin’s blade. A flash of movement, nothing more than a blur, followed, and the gray skin’s head dropped from his shoulders.

I blinked as the creature dissolved to reveal Chucky boy standing behind him, the royal letter opener dripping with black blood.

I’m not going to lie. It was a bit surreal to realize the king had just saved my life. Not that he was my king. I didn’t belong to this world, not really.

But still. I was here, and he was king of here.

And he’d just saved my life.

“You’re doing great,” he said, and then darted off again.

The guy moved like he lived on espresso and Red Bull. I was hauling ass, trying to save my ass, but he – he was something else, leaping from gray skin to gray skin like a maniac. By time I’d downed two of them, he’d worked through half a dozen gray skins.

A few tin cans had come closer, but they still hadn’t reached us. I made the decision – probably a stupid decision, but I didn’t have a lot of good options – to stick with Chucky boy.

I’d worry about the long-term consequences of getting caught with the scepter if we made it out alive. Right now, getting out was the priority.

We went round and round, dodging incoming hits and striking whenever openings presented themselves.

The tin cans had drawn close now, though only a handful remained alive. Most were in full helmet and armor, but they were accompanied by a sandy haired youth in a smattering of leather and chainmail. A squire, I assumed. A very lucky squire to have survived so far.

I figured that my moment would come when they reached us. The gray skins would be distracted by the tin cans, the tin cans would be distracted by the king, and the king would be distracted by everything else.

And I could slip away, unnoticed by anyone.

I worked to cut an opening for them, while keeping an eye on my escape route. I was just rounding to make sure my way back remained open when my foot caught, not on a corpse but, seemingly, on thin air. I went sprawling. My back collided with something fleshy, and someone screamed. I went down hard, and a thought flashed through my mind.

[Salvidora’s Curse: your sins will find you out. May this luck penalty recall your sins to mind and put your feet on the straight and narrow path.]

Cursing, oblivious to the pain of repeated zaps, I rose. To my surprise, the gray skins hadn’t descended on me. Instead, they seemed to be clustered around a tapestry, blind to the world around them.

It took me a moment to understand why. As two of the figures shifted, I caught a glimpse of the tapestry. More particularly, of its hanger.

Chucky boy sagged, limp and lifeless, on it. He’d stumbled somehow straight into the end of it, and the finial had impaled him like a spear. Charles VIII was very, very dead.

Shit. So much for long live the king.