Gilgamesh Wulfenbach and the Men of Letters 8/18
Previous | Master Post
Chapter 8
The Road to Mulverschtag
“Umeka teee?” Zoing asked Dean an hour later in Gil’s flight lab.
“Huh?” Dean replied distractedly, tightening the last bolt on the new flyer’s manifold. “Ask Sam.”
“Whirrheee?”
“The hell should I know? I ain’t from here.”
“Dean doesn’t drink tea, Zoing,” Gil explained, wiping his hands on a rag to remove any fuel that might have spilled when he’d filled the fuel tank. “But I’ll take a cup.”
Zoing squeaked an affirmative and bustled off.
Dean finished and closed the engine compartment. “How’d you find that out?”
“Oh, Sam mentioned it at breakfast,” Gil answered. “Sturmvoraus had already made tea, so Sam suggested saving the coffee for you. And given what happened with Tryggvassen, I think he was wise.”
Dean jumped down to join Gil in admiring their handiwork. “That... was a hell of a lot easier than it should have been.”
“Ah, well, I assume sparks in your world are as confined by the laws of physics as non-sparks are. Here we have more leeway.”
“-You’re kidding.”
“Not at all.” Gil accepted the teacup Zoing was bringing him. “Sam said you rebuilt Baby twice. How long did that take you each time?”
“Weeks.”
“Yet it took no more than six hours to repair the damage she sustained yesterday, including the time it took to retouch the paint. Rebuilding the engine took only half an hour, by my estimate. Plus, Baby already showed signs of being a spark’s construction when you first arrived-even Gadreel noticed the music coming on without your touching the controls. And we were barely out of town before you started slipping into a Spark-induced fugue state. Remember when Sam said you sounded like me?”
Wide-eyed, Dean swallowed hard and shook his head, denying the implication more than the memory. “Our dad was a mechanic. He taught me everything he knew.”
“Agatha was raised by mechanics, too. That gave her the skill. But the Spark... that was in her blood. And it’s in yours and Sam’s. Your world just didn’t relate to it the same way.” Gil punctuated his pronouncement with a drink of tea.
Dean was still floundering for a response when Sam and Sturmvoraus arrived, pushing a tank on a cart. “Wulfenbach!” Sturmvoraus called, looking significantly happier than he had all morning. “The spray idea is perfect! We tested it on a couple of the captured revenants. Even in the absence of inhalation, the formula immediately penetrates the skin and enters the bloodstream!”
“It’s like a hypospray,” Sam added, evidently more for Dean’s benefit than for Gil’s. “Only it doesn’t penetrate clothing, so the risk of overdose is negligible.”
Dean snorted. “If you say so, College Boy.”
So Dean hadn’t been to university, as Sam had, and was as uncomfortable with his lack of education as he was ashamed of his own intellectual gifts. Interesting. Gil would have to do something about that-later.
“Right,” he said, handing the teacup back to Zoing. “Let’s get this thing installed.”
Dean immediately pointed out the perfect spot on the flyer’s underside to attach the tank, and he and Sam bolted it into place while Gil and Sturmvoraus ran the cable for the valve control into the cockpit and attached the spray nozzles to the bottom of the leading edge of each wing. By the time the last nozzle was in place, Sam was running a hose up from the tank to the pipe feeding the nozzles on one side, and behind him Dean was securing it to the flyer’s body.
“You’ll have to fly pretty fast to distribute the formula evenly,” Sturmvoraus cautioned as Gil went to attach the hose on the other side. “I’d say 170 kilometers an hour, at least, maybe 200 or more.”
“No problem,” Gil replied. “The engine’s capable of speeds up to 250.”
“What?!”
“Had to cap it there. Wooster was afraid I’d kill myself if I didn’t.”
“Do you have any idea what could happen to you if you crash at that speed?!”
“Oh, I can tell you,” Dean muttered.
Gil ignored him and secured the hose connection. “I’m not going to crash. I’m going to fly over the battlefield, spray the revenants, and land. And I do in fact have practice in landing, both in a hangar on the castle and on the ground, so you needn’t worry there.”
“And if you get shot down?”
“The revenants aren’t armed. And in case you hadn’t noticed, I took the precaution of painting the Wulfenbach badge on the side and under the wings.”
“Better that than the Iron Cross,” quipped Sam, again apparently intending the comment only for Dean. “Does that make him the Green Baron?”
Dean laughed and started fastening down the second hose. Sam joined him.
“Need I remind you,” Sturmvoraus growled, “that you are not the hero of a penny dreadful?”
“If you think I have any intention of leaving you as Agatha’s only surviving suitor,” Gil shot back, “you’re even more delusional than I thought. I’m the only one with any experience flying this thing, other than Wooster, and he’s not here. You said you barely managed to land the other flyer, and you hate flying. So does Dean. And Sam....”
“Not a pilot,” Sam chimed in.
“So get Higgs to do it!” Sturmvoraus argued.
Gil frowned. “He’s not rated even as an airship pilot, plus he’s off dealing with the slime monsters.”
“Dupree, then!”
“You think I’d trust her with this? She’d probably overdose the whole lot, on purpose. Why are you-”
“Oh, get a room, you two,” Dean interrupted without looking away from his work.
Sturmvoraus turned purple and spluttered.
Before the conversation could get any more awkward, a knock at the door heralded Boris’ arrival with the latest dispatches. Sturmhalten appeared to be completely deserted, though the scout ship wisely wasn’t ruling out the possibility of people or monsters remaining inside buildings or underground. Higgs had opted to combine the rock salt and sodium bicarbonate and drop them together on the slime monsters, and the reported result was a disturbingly hilarious mixture of fizzing, frothing, and explosion. Gil ordered a hazardous material cleanup crew to deal with the aftermath. The revenants, fortunately, were still a kilometer or so from Mulverschtag. Unfortunately, it might not be possible for Gil to spray their front line without hitting his own.
“What side effects are we looking at?” he asked Sturmvoraus.
“Temporary incapacitation,” Sturmvoraus replied, “but it should wear off in a minute or two. Since the target is the wasp, it doesn’t pack the same punch as the inoculation formula.”
“So if the spray lands on Wulfenbach troops, I won’t be poisoning them?”
“W-ell, I’d need a much bigger clinical trial to guarantee that, but we don’t have time to worry over it.”
“No. I suppose not.” Gil sighed and looked at the dispatch again. He was going to have to chance it-along with something else. “Your people are going to need someone to rally to, though. The empire’s troops will be escorting them back to Sturmhalten, but if they come to and realize what they’ve done, their morale will be shattered.” He looked Sturmvoraus in the eye. “Your clothes should be ready by now. You three go get cleaned up. Then put a Sturmvoraus flag on the Impala and have a support ship set you down in the center of Mulverschtag.”
Sturmvoraus swallowed hard. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll turn on you?”
“With what army? Besides, you know what’s out there.”
“Including Zola.”
“Whom you have every reason to want to kill. I won’t stop you this time.”
They looked at each other for a moment. And something in his rival’s expression, torn between hope and worry, reminded Gil that for all their difficult history, for all the political and romantic strife between them, they were still, somewhere underneath it all, two boys whose terrible early childhoods had thrown them together and whose school experiences had forged them into something more, something he’d found again only with Theo and Sleipnir.
Best friends.
Brothers.
“Gil,” Tarvek said quietly, “fly safely.”
“I’ll see you in town, old boy,” Gil promised.
The Winchesters exchanged a look and followed Boris to the door, but Tarvek steadied the ladder while Gil lowered his goggles and climbed into the cockpit. Then Tarvek moved the ladder out of the way and located the button to open the hatch. They nodded to each other, and he pressed the button, dropping the flyer out. Gil hit the ignition switch, which started the engine perfectly, then waved back to his old chum and flew toward the battle, humming “Smoke on the Water.”
The en-suite bathroom in Gil’s quarters had only a single shower, so Prince Tarvek went ahead to take the first shower while Sam and Dean went back to Baby to retrieve their go bags, forgotten in the previous night’s excitement. Prince Tarvek said something about having clothes for them, but they still needed the spare shaving kits, if nothing else. After all, whatever function they were supposed to be serving in this little piece of kabuki, it probably fell into Fed-suit territory, not the kind of image that would go with a day’s worth of stubble.
“Good thing we kept these,” Sam murmured as Baby opened her trunk to let him grab the bags. Even with the bunker as a home base, old habits born of spending decades living in cheap motels and abandoned houses and frequently having to stay one jump ahead of the law, or of monsters seeking revenge, died hard. The go bags had long meant the difference between bugging out with only the clothes on their backs and bugging out with enough essentials to get clear across the country before having to go on the grid for anything. “Not that they’d have done us any good if the portal hadn’t brought her with us, but still.”
Baby honked twice and closed her trunk. That sounded like agreement, but he wasn’t quite sure, so he looked at Dean.
Dean just made a non-committal noise and accepted his bag. Sam wasn’t sure what to make of that beyond the fact that Dean wasn’t in a talking mood, so he didn’t try to push. It had been a hell of a morning already, and it wasn’t even half over.
Instead, he just sighed. “Thanks, Baby.”
Beep-beep! Okay, maybe that was an affirmative.
“We’ll be back in a little bit. If anyone comes to take you before then, though, it’s okay-Gil wants us to meet him in Mulverschtag, but we have to fly there first. They’ll have to put you on an airship so you can come with us.”
Beep-beep. “Bye-bye, so long, farewell....”
Dean snorted and smiled. “Don’t worry, Baby. We’ll be back.” He patted her hood, and the brothers left.
Truth be told, Sam wasn’t in much of a talking mood himself. He didn’t understand this place. Okay, sure, if anyone could build an airplane in an hour given a diagram and a helper, it would be Dean. Yes, the brothers did give each other a hard time over their respective levels of education, but Sam knew Dean wasn’t stupid, and about the only reason he’d been willing to tackle being Mr. Fix-it during those months in Kermit after hitting Riot was that he’d been able to imagine Dean talking him through the repairs. So on that level, it probably wasn’t that weird that people as science-minded as Gil and Prince Tarvek would pick up on that side of Dean, and of Sam, in spite of Dean’s general deflection of any attempt to label him as a nerd. But Prince Tarvek had gotten really wrapped up in solving the hypospray problem, and Sam had... kept up with him a whole lot better than he’d expected, given how long it had been since he’d taken Biochemistry. Not only that, but when Sam had suggested going for skin absorption rather than inhalation and described what he could remember of Star Trek-style hyposprays, Prince Tarvek seemed to take it as further confirmation of Sam’s being a spark.
This whole thing with the Spark... maybe it had something to do with the Winchesters being archangel vessels. Sam wasn’t sure. All he knew was that the declaration had hit him a little like hearing Yer a wizard, Harry, only a decade or so after his having accepted being a Muggle-or a squib or something. It was disorienting. (It made him miss Charlie.) And he prided himself on his intellectual abilities, on being a Man of Letters. Dean had to be reeling even worse.
Hell, Dean had brought his car to life, without even trying or knowing how. Even by Winchester standards, that was a new level of weird. Yet Gil had reacted like it was totally normal for a car to be sassing him back when he tried to call her down. (Of course she had an attitude. She was a muscle car. She was Dean’s.)
Sam sighed. Thinking about it was only giving him a headache. The point was....
-The point was they were walking up to Gil’s quarters, and one of those weird silver-haired, lizard-eyed footmen-Lackya, was that the name?-was standing outside waiting for them. And Dean’s hand was reaching for his silver knife.
Sam caught his wrist. “It’s not a vetala, Dean.”
“Well, it sure as hell ain’t human,” Dean rumbled back.
“I think they’re called Lackya. They’re servants.”
“Lackya-what, like lackeys?”
“Basically, yeah.”
Dean grumbled and pulled away but didn’t go for his knife again.
As they approached the door, the Lackya tugged nervously at the front tail of his hot pink coat and bowed. “Prince Tarvek’s compliments, my lords,” he said. “Your clothes are laid out for you. As time is pressing, His Highness requests that you prepare to shower quickly and not wait for him to finish his own toilette.”
Dean frowned in confusion. “What?”
“Uh, thank you,” Sam replied.
The Lackya bowed again and opened the door for them, keeping a wary eye on Dean until they were inside Gil’s room and he could safely close the door again.
“Seriously, Sam,” Dean pressed. “What the hell did he say?”
“Prince Tarvek doesn’t want us to wait for him to finish getting dressed before one of us goes in to shower,” Sam translated.
“So why couldn’t that lackey dude just say that?”
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, man. Literally.”
Dean sighed and dropped his go bag next to the bed. “Wish Charlie was here.”
“Yeah. So do I.”
It sounded like the shower was still running, so the brothers took a moment to examine the three-piece suits that had been laid out for them. Whoever designed them had chosen a Western cut, which would help minimize the potential awkwardness of having to wear period clothes. Dean probably wouldn’t mind, given his enthusiasm for dressing up for that trip to Sunrise, but Sam had never been hugely into costuming apart from Fed suits and other practical costumes that served to get them where they needed to go for hunts. Of course, this little adventure was a hunt of sorts, so it wasn’t like... well... dressing up in medieval garb and face paint to go LARPing with Charlie. Even though that had ended up being kind of fun.
Anyway. Sam’s suit was a nice lightweight chocolate brown wool, with a light blue shirt and a vest made of what looked like navy silk with tone-on-tone trilobites woven into it. He didn’t even want to think about how much something like that would cost. Dean’s suit was gunmetal grey, almost the same color as his Untouchables suit, and came with an ivory vest and a dark green shirt.
“What’s with the bugs?” Dean asked, holding his vest up to examine the pattern in better light.
“It’s the Heterodyne sigil. It was all over Mechanicsburg, remember?”
“Mm. Right, right. Guess we’re Agatha’s representatives in all this, or something.”
The shower turned off.
“I think your hat will go with the suit just fine,” Sam noted. “And the vest goes with your gun.”
Dean chuckled and finally set the vest down. “Yeah, but I almost hate to put my badge on it.”
“The badge probably ought to go on the coat anyway.”
“Yeah, but it’ll look stupid. The Man with No Name never wore a suit coat.”
“Never wore a badge, either.”
“True.”
“Dude, you’ll look like Ezra Standish. It’ll be fine.”
“I am so not Ezra Standish! Chris Larabee, maybe.”
“Yeah, but he wore all black.”
“Sam....”
“Look, forget the badge. ‘We don’t need no stinkin’ badges,’ right? We’re Men of Letters.”
Dean snorted.
Just then, Prince Tarvek stuck his head around the edge of the bathroom door. “Ah, good, I thought I heard your voices. The shower’s free, if you don’t mind my finishing up at the sink; we shouldn’t waste any time.”
Sam shrugged with his eyebrows and looked at Dean, who said, “Just leave me some hot water.”
Sam huffed in amusement and handed Dean his gun, watch, and pocket contents, then quickly grabbed the essentials out of his go bag, along with his suit pants and shirt, before heading into the bathroom. The shower cubicle didn’t quite look big enough for Sam to feel comfortable sitting down in the front half to take off his boots and socks, but there was a claw-foot tub as well, so he sat down on the edge of that so as to have more maneuvering room.
Prince Tarvek was already halfway dressed and was buttoning his silver-grey shirt. “There are towels in there,” he said, nodding toward the shower. “You can pile the laundry by the tub here; Zoing will see to it while we’re away.”
Sam nodded. “Gotcha.” He set his boots out of the way and added his socks to the laundry pile, then decided to make use of the space while he had it and took off his shirts. When he looked up, however, Prince Tarvek was frowning at him. “What?”
“That’s... an unusual tattoo.” Prince Tarvek put his pince-nez on to get a better look at the starburst-pentangle inked on the left side of Sam’s chest. “Do all Americans have them?”
Sam snorted. “I wish. Would make our job a lot easier if they did.”
“Oh, so it’s not some national symbol or the sign of your house?”
“No, nothing like that. It’s an anti-possession sigil.”
“Ah, I see... professional hazard, being a demon hunter.”
“You could say that.”
“Standard practice?”
Sam stood up and dropped his shirts on the laundry pile. “No, although it probably should be. Dean didn’t think of it until after I’d been possessed the first time.”
Prince Tarvek’s eyes widened. “You’ve-”
“Yeah. Twice.” Sam decided not to factor Gadreel into the equation this time; he hadn’t recovered many memories of the times when the angel had taken control, but it didn’t seem like he’d done anything... unangelic, so to speak.
Prince Tarvek frowned. “Twice?! But if the sigil worked....”
“The second time was Lucifer. He’s still an archangel and had to get my consent, so the sigil didn’t matter. And I only gave my consent so I could throw him back in the Cage.”
“What... what was it like, being possessed?”
Sam frowned. “What?”
“I-I don’t mean how it happened. Obviously, that wouldn’t necessarily be the same in both worlds. But... well, Agatha, you know, was possessed by Lucrezia, and I’m about to go home to a town full of people who’ve been mind-controlled, and... I just... look, Gil accused me of wanting to become Lucrezia’s successor. I don’t. But there are things I hadn’t thought through before that I’m having to consider now, and I just don’t have enough data.”
“Your Highness, I’m not sure you really want to know.”
“I probably don’t. But I believe I need to.”
Sam sighed and tried for the most concise explanation. “All right. Imagine waking up to find that you’d killed Gil and Violetta, feeling yourself beating Agatha to death, watching her bleed out under your hands, and hearing your voice say things to her that you would never in your life want to say to anyone, not even your worst enemy... and there’s not a damn thing you can do to stop it.”
Prince Tarvek paled and steadied himself on the edge of the sink.
Considering the point made, Sam went into the shower cubicle and tried not to think about the taste of blood, the stench of sulfur-anything beyond the task at hand. It didn’t work. By the time he shut the water off, the only thing that felt clean was his skin. Once he was dried off and dressed enough to leave the cubicle, though, he had himself pulled together well enough that he thought he could face the prince again. The startling fact that his new clothes fit perfectly and felt pretty comfortable helped. But he’d resolutely tuned out any noises or smells beyond the shower itself, so it surprised him to find Dean waiting for him by the sink instead of Prince Tarvek.
“Dude,” Dean said quietly, putting down his razor. “What the hell did you say to him?”
“He wanted to know what possession was like,” Sam replied at the same volume.
Dean raised his chin in understanding. “What’d you tell him about?”
“Stull.” There had been horrifying moments in his first possession, too, especially when the demon, Meg, had come close to doing unspeakable things to the brothers’ friend Jo Harvelle; but Dean had put a stop to that, and later Bobby had stopped Meg from killing Dean. Watching Lucifer beat Dean to a bloody pulp on Baby’s hood in Stull Cemetery after killing Cas and Bobby had been orders of magnitude worse. His being able to overpower Lucifer long enough to throw himself into the Cage had been an absolute miracle.
Dean nodded slowly. “Well, it worked. He tossed his cookies. Zoing’s gone to get him some ginger tea.”
“Gonna take a lot more than ginger tea to help the people of Sturmhalten.”
“Yeah. I know.” Dean squeezed Sam’s shoulder and went in to get his own shower.
Sam blew the air out of his cheeks and finished getting ready for the day, wrapping up just about the time Dean finished his shower. But he couldn’t find his boots.
“Lackya took ’em,” Dean explained when Sam asked. “Said the cordwainer had some way to get the dimensions of your feet from the wear pattern.”
“The cordwainer?”
“Don’t look at me, dude. At least you didn’t have to deal with some clank thing grabbin’ your foot to take measurements of.”
Sam huffed a laugh in spite of himself and left the bathroom to find Prince Tarvek, with his shirt only half buttoned and his chin still unshaven, nursing the last of his cup of tea. Zoing was standing by the teapot, ready to pour him another cup. Neither seemed to notice Sam as he put his shaving kit back in his go bag and picked up his vest to put on.
“Hey,” Sam said quietly, shrugging into the vest. “You okay, Your Highness?”
Prince Tarvek sighed without looking up. “No. But perhaps I shouldn’t be.”
Sam didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything.
“Look, Winchester-Sam-I need a favor.”
Sam shrugged and started buttoning the vest. “Shoot.”
“You and your brother seem to have no use for titles and ranks. I find that... rather refreshing at the moment. So please, both of you... call me just plain Tarvek, and ‘dude’ and ‘man’ and whatever else instead of ‘Your Highness.’ I think... I could use the humility.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“Thank you. And thank you for your honesty earlier. You were right; I didn’t want to know. But now I do. And now I know what I must do.”
Sam frowned in concern. “What does that mean?”
Tarvek did look up at that, blinked, and smiled and shook his head. “Oh, don’t worry. I don’t intend to harm myself in any way except maybe politically. I still have every intention of reclaiming the Throne of Lightning. I’ve just realized that there are some prices I’m not willing to pay to get it.”
Sam nodded. “Gotcha.”
Dean came out of the bathroom just then, and at the same time the Lackya returned with new boots for all three men and a gun belt for Sam. Tarvek went in to shave while Sam and Dean finished gearing up, which involved a lot of discussion about the proper way to wear a gun belt under a frock coat when all one had to go on were classic Westerns that the brothers knew from unfortunate experience weren’t accurate and a lot more discussion of whether they ought to worry about their weapons not being period-correct and whether any of the above even mattered when almost everything could be handwaved on account of the Winchesters being the only Americans these people had ever seen. Tarvek came out of the bathroom laughing so hard he was holding his sides.
Then they all put on their suit coats and headed back to Baby, who was being loaded onto a cart and gave them a happy honking-to before playing a few bars of “Come Go with Me.”
“We’re comin’!” Dean called back. “Keep your chrome on.”
That earned him five quick honks that sounded like laughter.
The flight to Mulverschtag was mercifully short and filled mainly by Dean and Tarvek standing in the middle of the cargo hold commiserating about how much they hated flying. Sam took the opportunity to whisper to Baby that she should probably keep mum when they disembarked, and she honked twice quietly in agreement. Then she played the opening of “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron.”
“What-are you asking about Gil?”
Beep-beep.
“We’re meeting him there, remember?”
Beep. “Up in the sky, a man in a plane....”
“Oh. I haven’t heard, but we would have if anything was wrong.”
Beep-beep.
“Approaching Mulverschtag, my lords,” called someone from the bridge.
Baby held her doors open, and the three men got in, although Tarvek still looked a little spooked by her. The airship touched down in the town square a minute or so later, and Baby rolled out of the hold and over to the bat-winged flyer, where Gil was talking with a couple of very large Jägers in red uniforms. Tarvek heaved an audible sigh of relief.
“Everything went like clockwork,” Gil reported as they got out and the airship crew began loading the flyer into the cargo hold. “The Sturmhalteners should be arriving in a few minutes. Sam, Dean, I don’t think you’ve met Gen. Khrizhan and Gen. Goomblast. Gentlemen, Sam and Dean Winchester from America. They’re here to help Agatha.”
“Vell, vell!” said Gen. Khrizhan, whose gold-capped tusks and gruff voice were a little intimidating despite his friendly smile. “Zo hyu iz de boyz vot kilt der batterink ram?”
Dean cleared his throat and squared his shoulders. “Uh, yes, sir.”
“Goot, goot. Und now hyu help uz fight De Odder’s bogs, yah?”
“Yes, sir. That’s why we’re here.”
Sam nodded his agreement.
“Verra goot!” boomed Gen. Goomblast, whose sharp-toothed smile was practically Leviathan-wide. “Our Heterodyne needz all de allies she ken get!”
“Hoy,” Gen. Khrizhan interrupted, sobering as he looked past the brothers. “Der Storm King looks a leetle green.”
Frowning in concern, Sam turned to Tarvek, who really did look pretty grey of face out here in the sunlight. Sam had thought it was just the reflection off his shirt, but that would be muted now that he had his red suit coat on. The passing shadow of the departing airship didn’t change that perception.
But Tarvek managed a wan smile and a slight chuckle. “Not as green as I was a couple of days ago. I’ll make it. Mr. Winchester just gave me some information that will make me a better king, that’s all. So, what’s the plan?”
Gil looked worried, but he answered, “Well, the Jägers are sending a messenger back to Mechanicsburg to get Agatha’s permission for them to help us track down the Geisterdamen. Your people, as I said, should be arriving any time now. And the innkeeper here”-he pointed to a tavern a few doors down that had a balcony overlooking the square-“said you can use his balcony if you want to make an address.”
Tarvek nodded slowly, looking up at the balcony. “Yes. Yes, I think I’d better. And I want you and the Winchesters up there with me.”
Gil blinked. “What? Why?”
“Trust me.”
“I don’t think I-”
Tarvek looked Gil in the eye. “Trust me.”
Gil sighed. “All right, fine. Don’t make me regret this.”
Sam wasn’t sure who was trying harder not to make a smart remark, Dean or Baby. Either way, there wasn’t really time for one; it sounded like the Sturmhalteners were just a few streets away. So Tarvek took a deep breath and headed for the tavern, and Gil and the Winchesters followed him inside and upstairs to the door that led to the balcony. Baby and the Jägers followed, too, though judging from what Sam could hear behind him, they were stationing themselves outside the tavern as people began filling the square and the Jägers instructed them to wait.
“Tarvek,” Gil said quietly, “just so you know, I don’t have casualty estimates yet, but... your losses were pretty heavy. I gave orders that the dead be returned to Sturmhalten for burial.”
Eyes shutting in pain, Tarvek bowed his head and braced himself against the door with his left hand. After a moment, though, he hauled in a deep breath and nodded. “Thank you.”
“You sure about this?” Dean asked Tarvek as he straightened.
“No,” Tarvek admitted. “But Gil was right. My people need me.”
Gil definitely looked worried at that. But Sam, who had stationed himself at a window, noticed that the crowd noise was pretty muted, all things considered. There wasn’t much talking; in fact, most of what he could hear were sniffles and sobs. This crowd wasn’t going to be inclined to turn into a mob, no matter what Tarvek said.
Then again, Tarvek was supposed to be the Storm King... and green clouds usually went before hail and even tornadoes. There was no telling what was about to happen.
“They’re ready,” Sam reported when it looked like the last of the crowd had arrived.
Tarvek looked at Gil, still plainly heartsick. “Stand with me, Gil. Please.”
Gil hesitated, then nodded. “All right.”
Tarvek nodded back, pulled himself together with another deep breath, and opened the door. He and Gil walked out together, with Gil to Tarvek’s left; Dean fell in two steps back to Gil’s left, and Sam two steps back to Tarvek’s right. Sam was thus able to see when Tarvek’s stride faltered briefly and his shoulders slumped minutely upon his first sight of the size of the crowd, which didn’t look very big to Sam. But that moment of defeat was barely the space of two heartbeats. Then Tarvek’s shoulders squared again, and his face seemed to set in determination as he walked up to the balcony rail. Gil stopped a couple of steps behind Tarvek, and Sam and Dean stopped when Gil did.
“People of Sturmhalten,” Tarvek began, his voice carrying effortlessly. “We have all lost a great deal these last days. My father is dead. My sister is dead. Many of your friends and family are dead. And those of you here have lost a measure of innocence you may not have known was yours to lose.
“But those losses are not the fault of the Wulfenbach Empire,” he went on, startling Gil. “The groundwork was laid many years ago and built upon by my father and his friends. None of these things would have been possible without the evils wrought by The Other-Lucrezia Mongfish.”
Gasps of horror went up across the square.
“I do not know how I can repair the damage done to each of you by my family,” Tarvek continued. “But this much I can do. I hereby denounce the Lady Lucrezia and all her works. I renounce all ties my family has held to the Geisterdamen and to Lucrezia’s servants among the Knights of Jove. And I swear before God and all of you that I will help my friend, Baron Gilgamesh Wulfenbach”-here he pulled Gil forward and put his hand on Gil’s shoulder-“along with the Lady Agatha Heterodyne and her servants and friends, including the Jägers and the Men of Letters, to hunt down and destroy all remnants of Lucrezia’s work, to free people infected with slaver wasps whose infection has not made them obvious revenants, and to restore the peace of Europa.” He paused, swallowed hard, and concluded, “May God forgive us and help us all.”
The sniffling grew louder.
As Tarvek stepped back, Gil cleared his throat. “People of Sturmhalten, you know how my father treated rebels, but what you have done was not by choice, and no punishment I could devise can possibly be worse than the memories you will have to live with. I hold you blameless and accept Prince Tarvek’s vow of friendship and assistance. Wulfenbach and Heterodyne forces will accompany you back to Sturmhalten, both to ensure your safe conduct and to stand ready should our investigation into the late Prince Aaronev’s work with Lucrezia Mongfish reveal information that requires immediate action. Go home and mourn, but do not fear reprisal.”
About half the crowd broke down at that and wept. Gil and Tarvek looked at each other and turned to go inside, flanked by the Winchesters.
As Dean closed the door behind them, Gil looked at Tarvek again and said, “You may have just committed suicide.”
Tarvek’s dark eyes flashed. “If the Knights of Jove think they can kill me now, they’ve got another think coming. But even if they succeed, at least I’ll die knowing I did the right thing.”
“And invoking God?”
“Let’s say I’m... reconsidering my atheism.”
Gil pondered that a moment, then smiled a little and clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Sam and Dean exchanged a look and followed them down the stairs.
“I still reserve the right to kill you myself if necessary,” Gil added, giving Tarvek a friendly jostle.
Tarvek managed to chuckle. “Oho, just you try.”
Sam and Dean exchanged another look and barely managed not to laugh out loud. They all had their game faces back on as they reached the tavern’s front door, however, and somehow it seemed appropriate to be getting into their big black car given the somber mood of the crowd. The innkeeper handed Dean a basket of food on the way out and refused to accept payment, even from Gil. Baby held her doors open for them, and the Jäger generals promised to follow with the civilians. So in they got, and Dean followed Tarvek’s directions to get out of town, going slowly not only to let the Sturmhalteners keep up but also out of caution because of the aftermath of the slime monster battle up ahead.
Baby managed to hold her peace until they got out of town. But then she switched on her radio and burst into... “Snoopy’s Christmas.”
Next
Chapter 8
The Road to Mulverschtag
“Umeka teee?” Zoing asked Dean an hour later in Gil’s flight lab.
“Huh?” Dean replied distractedly, tightening the last bolt on the new flyer’s manifold. “Ask Sam.”
“Whirrheee?”
“The hell should I know? I ain’t from here.”
“Dean doesn’t drink tea, Zoing,” Gil explained, wiping his hands on a rag to remove any fuel that might have spilled when he’d filled the fuel tank. “But I’ll take a cup.”
Zoing squeaked an affirmative and bustled off.
Dean finished and closed the engine compartment. “How’d you find that out?”
“Oh, Sam mentioned it at breakfast,” Gil answered. “Sturmvoraus had already made tea, so Sam suggested saving the coffee for you. And given what happened with Tryggvassen, I think he was wise.”
Dean jumped down to join Gil in admiring their handiwork. “That... was a hell of a lot easier than it should have been.”
“Ah, well, I assume sparks in your world are as confined by the laws of physics as non-sparks are. Here we have more leeway.”
“-You’re kidding.”
“Not at all.” Gil accepted the teacup Zoing was bringing him. “Sam said you rebuilt Baby twice. How long did that take you each time?”
“Weeks.”
“Yet it took no more than six hours to repair the damage she sustained yesterday, including the time it took to retouch the paint. Rebuilding the engine took only half an hour, by my estimate. Plus, Baby already showed signs of being a spark’s construction when you first arrived-even Gadreel noticed the music coming on without your touching the controls. And we were barely out of town before you started slipping into a Spark-induced fugue state. Remember when Sam said you sounded like me?”
Wide-eyed, Dean swallowed hard and shook his head, denying the implication more than the memory. “Our dad was a mechanic. He taught me everything he knew.”
“Agatha was raised by mechanics, too. That gave her the skill. But the Spark... that was in her blood. And it’s in yours and Sam’s. Your world just didn’t relate to it the same way.” Gil punctuated his pronouncement with a drink of tea.
Dean was still floundering for a response when Sam and Sturmvoraus arrived, pushing a tank on a cart. “Wulfenbach!” Sturmvoraus called, looking significantly happier than he had all morning. “The spray idea is perfect! We tested it on a couple of the captured revenants. Even in the absence of inhalation, the formula immediately penetrates the skin and enters the bloodstream!”
“It’s like a hypospray,” Sam added, evidently more for Dean’s benefit than for Gil’s. “Only it doesn’t penetrate clothing, so the risk of overdose is negligible.”
Dean snorted. “If you say so, College Boy.”
So Dean hadn’t been to university, as Sam had, and was as uncomfortable with his lack of education as he was ashamed of his own intellectual gifts. Interesting. Gil would have to do something about that-later.
“Right,” he said, handing the teacup back to Zoing. “Let’s get this thing installed.”
Dean immediately pointed out the perfect spot on the flyer’s underside to attach the tank, and he and Sam bolted it into place while Gil and Sturmvoraus ran the cable for the valve control into the cockpit and attached the spray nozzles to the bottom of the leading edge of each wing. By the time the last nozzle was in place, Sam was running a hose up from the tank to the pipe feeding the nozzles on one side, and behind him Dean was securing it to the flyer’s body.
“You’ll have to fly pretty fast to distribute the formula evenly,” Sturmvoraus cautioned as Gil went to attach the hose on the other side. “I’d say 170 kilometers an hour, at least, maybe 200 or more.”
“No problem,” Gil replied. “The engine’s capable of speeds up to 250.”
“What?!”
“Had to cap it there. Wooster was afraid I’d kill myself if I didn’t.”
“Do you have any idea what could happen to you if you crash at that speed?!”
“Oh, I can tell you,” Dean muttered.
Gil ignored him and secured the hose connection. “I’m not going to crash. I’m going to fly over the battlefield, spray the revenants, and land. And I do in fact have practice in landing, both in a hangar on the castle and on the ground, so you needn’t worry there.”
“And if you get shot down?”
“The revenants aren’t armed. And in case you hadn’t noticed, I took the precaution of painting the Wulfenbach badge on the side and under the wings.”
“Better that than the Iron Cross,” quipped Sam, again apparently intending the comment only for Dean. “Does that make him the Green Baron?”
Dean laughed and started fastening down the second hose. Sam joined him.
“Need I remind you,” Sturmvoraus growled, “that you are not the hero of a penny dreadful?”
“If you think I have any intention of leaving you as Agatha’s only surviving suitor,” Gil shot back, “you’re even more delusional than I thought. I’m the only one with any experience flying this thing, other than Wooster, and he’s not here. You said you barely managed to land the other flyer, and you hate flying. So does Dean. And Sam....”
“Not a pilot,” Sam chimed in.
“So get Higgs to do it!” Sturmvoraus argued.
Gil frowned. “He’s not rated even as an airship pilot, plus he’s off dealing with the slime monsters.”
“Dupree, then!”
“You think I’d trust her with this? She’d probably overdose the whole lot, on purpose. Why are you-”
“Oh, get a room, you two,” Dean interrupted without looking away from his work.
Sturmvoraus turned purple and spluttered.
Before the conversation could get any more awkward, a knock at the door heralded Boris’ arrival with the latest dispatches. Sturmhalten appeared to be completely deserted, though the scout ship wisely wasn’t ruling out the possibility of people or monsters remaining inside buildings or underground. Higgs had opted to combine the rock salt and sodium bicarbonate and drop them together on the slime monsters, and the reported result was a disturbingly hilarious mixture of fizzing, frothing, and explosion. Gil ordered a hazardous material cleanup crew to deal with the aftermath. The revenants, fortunately, were still a kilometer or so from Mulverschtag. Unfortunately, it might not be possible for Gil to spray their front line without hitting his own.
“What side effects are we looking at?” he asked Sturmvoraus.
“Temporary incapacitation,” Sturmvoraus replied, “but it should wear off in a minute or two. Since the target is the wasp, it doesn’t pack the same punch as the inoculation formula.”
“So if the spray lands on Wulfenbach troops, I won’t be poisoning them?”
“W-ell, I’d need a much bigger clinical trial to guarantee that, but we don’t have time to worry over it.”
“No. I suppose not.” Gil sighed and looked at the dispatch again. He was going to have to chance it-along with something else. “Your people are going to need someone to rally to, though. The empire’s troops will be escorting them back to Sturmhalten, but if they come to and realize what they’ve done, their morale will be shattered.” He looked Sturmvoraus in the eye. “Your clothes should be ready by now. You three go get cleaned up. Then put a Sturmvoraus flag on the Impala and have a support ship set you down in the center of Mulverschtag.”
Sturmvoraus swallowed hard. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll turn on you?”
“With what army? Besides, you know what’s out there.”
“Including Zola.”
“Whom you have every reason to want to kill. I won’t stop you this time.”
They looked at each other for a moment. And something in his rival’s expression, torn between hope and worry, reminded Gil that for all their difficult history, for all the political and romantic strife between them, they were still, somewhere underneath it all, two boys whose terrible early childhoods had thrown them together and whose school experiences had forged them into something more, something he’d found again only with Theo and Sleipnir.
Best friends.
Brothers.
“Gil,” Tarvek said quietly, “fly safely.”
“I’ll see you in town, old boy,” Gil promised.
The Winchesters exchanged a look and followed Boris to the door, but Tarvek steadied the ladder while Gil lowered his goggles and climbed into the cockpit. Then Tarvek moved the ladder out of the way and located the button to open the hatch. They nodded to each other, and he pressed the button, dropping the flyer out. Gil hit the ignition switch, which started the engine perfectly, then waved back to his old chum and flew toward the battle, humming “Smoke on the Water.”
The en-suite bathroom in Gil’s quarters had only a single shower, so Prince Tarvek went ahead to take the first shower while Sam and Dean went back to Baby to retrieve their go bags, forgotten in the previous night’s excitement. Prince Tarvek said something about having clothes for them, but they still needed the spare shaving kits, if nothing else. After all, whatever function they were supposed to be serving in this little piece of kabuki, it probably fell into Fed-suit territory, not the kind of image that would go with a day’s worth of stubble.
“Good thing we kept these,” Sam murmured as Baby opened her trunk to let him grab the bags. Even with the bunker as a home base, old habits born of spending decades living in cheap motels and abandoned houses and frequently having to stay one jump ahead of the law, or of monsters seeking revenge, died hard. The go bags had long meant the difference between bugging out with only the clothes on their backs and bugging out with enough essentials to get clear across the country before having to go on the grid for anything. “Not that they’d have done us any good if the portal hadn’t brought her with us, but still.”
Baby honked twice and closed her trunk. That sounded like agreement, but he wasn’t quite sure, so he looked at Dean.
Dean just made a non-committal noise and accepted his bag. Sam wasn’t sure what to make of that beyond the fact that Dean wasn’t in a talking mood, so he didn’t try to push. It had been a hell of a morning already, and it wasn’t even half over.
Instead, he just sighed. “Thanks, Baby.”
Beep-beep! Okay, maybe that was an affirmative.
“We’ll be back in a little bit. If anyone comes to take you before then, though, it’s okay-Gil wants us to meet him in Mulverschtag, but we have to fly there first. They’ll have to put you on an airship so you can come with us.”
Beep-beep. “Bye-bye, so long, farewell....”
Dean snorted and smiled. “Don’t worry, Baby. We’ll be back.” He patted her hood, and the brothers left.
Truth be told, Sam wasn’t in much of a talking mood himself. He didn’t understand this place. Okay, sure, if anyone could build an airplane in an hour given a diagram and a helper, it would be Dean. Yes, the brothers did give each other a hard time over their respective levels of education, but Sam knew Dean wasn’t stupid, and about the only reason he’d been willing to tackle being Mr. Fix-it during those months in Kermit after hitting Riot was that he’d been able to imagine Dean talking him through the repairs. So on that level, it probably wasn’t that weird that people as science-minded as Gil and Prince Tarvek would pick up on that side of Dean, and of Sam, in spite of Dean’s general deflection of any attempt to label him as a nerd. But Prince Tarvek had gotten really wrapped up in solving the hypospray problem, and Sam had... kept up with him a whole lot better than he’d expected, given how long it had been since he’d taken Biochemistry. Not only that, but when Sam had suggested going for skin absorption rather than inhalation and described what he could remember of Star Trek-style hyposprays, Prince Tarvek seemed to take it as further confirmation of Sam’s being a spark.
This whole thing with the Spark... maybe it had something to do with the Winchesters being archangel vessels. Sam wasn’t sure. All he knew was that the declaration had hit him a little like hearing Yer a wizard, Harry, only a decade or so after his having accepted being a Muggle-or a squib or something. It was disorienting. (It made him miss Charlie.) And he prided himself on his intellectual abilities, on being a Man of Letters. Dean had to be reeling even worse.
Hell, Dean had brought his car to life, without even trying or knowing how. Even by Winchester standards, that was a new level of weird. Yet Gil had reacted like it was totally normal for a car to be sassing him back when he tried to call her down. (Of course she had an attitude. She was a muscle car. She was Dean’s.)
Sam sighed. Thinking about it was only giving him a headache. The point was....
-The point was they were walking up to Gil’s quarters, and one of those weird silver-haired, lizard-eyed footmen-Lackya, was that the name?-was standing outside waiting for them. And Dean’s hand was reaching for his silver knife.
Sam caught his wrist. “It’s not a vetala, Dean.”
“Well, it sure as hell ain’t human,” Dean rumbled back.
“I think they’re called Lackya. They’re servants.”
“Lackya-what, like lackeys?”
“Basically, yeah.”
Dean grumbled and pulled away but didn’t go for his knife again.
As they approached the door, the Lackya tugged nervously at the front tail of his hot pink coat and bowed. “Prince Tarvek’s compliments, my lords,” he said. “Your clothes are laid out for you. As time is pressing, His Highness requests that you prepare to shower quickly and not wait for him to finish his own toilette.”
Dean frowned in confusion. “What?”
“Uh, thank you,” Sam replied.
The Lackya bowed again and opened the door for them, keeping a wary eye on Dean until they were inside Gil’s room and he could safely close the door again.
“Seriously, Sam,” Dean pressed. “What the hell did he say?”
“Prince Tarvek doesn’t want us to wait for him to finish getting dressed before one of us goes in to shower,” Sam translated.
“So why couldn’t that lackey dude just say that?”
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, man. Literally.”
Dean sighed and dropped his go bag next to the bed. “Wish Charlie was here.”
“Yeah. So do I.”
It sounded like the shower was still running, so the brothers took a moment to examine the three-piece suits that had been laid out for them. Whoever designed them had chosen a Western cut, which would help minimize the potential awkwardness of having to wear period clothes. Dean probably wouldn’t mind, given his enthusiasm for dressing up for that trip to Sunrise, but Sam had never been hugely into costuming apart from Fed suits and other practical costumes that served to get them where they needed to go for hunts. Of course, this little adventure was a hunt of sorts, so it wasn’t like... well... dressing up in medieval garb and face paint to go LARPing with Charlie. Even though that had ended up being kind of fun.
Anyway. Sam’s suit was a nice lightweight chocolate brown wool, with a light blue shirt and a vest made of what looked like navy silk with tone-on-tone trilobites woven into it. He didn’t even want to think about how much something like that would cost. Dean’s suit was gunmetal grey, almost the same color as his Untouchables suit, and came with an ivory vest and a dark green shirt.
“What’s with the bugs?” Dean asked, holding his vest up to examine the pattern in better light.
“It’s the Heterodyne sigil. It was all over Mechanicsburg, remember?”
“Mm. Right, right. Guess we’re Agatha’s representatives in all this, or something.”
The shower turned off.
“I think your hat will go with the suit just fine,” Sam noted. “And the vest goes with your gun.”
Dean chuckled and finally set the vest down. “Yeah, but I almost hate to put my badge on it.”
“The badge probably ought to go on the coat anyway.”
“Yeah, but it’ll look stupid. The Man with No Name never wore a suit coat.”
“Never wore a badge, either.”
“True.”
“Dude, you’ll look like Ezra Standish. It’ll be fine.”
“I am so not Ezra Standish! Chris Larabee, maybe.”
“Yeah, but he wore all black.”
“Sam....”
“Look, forget the badge. ‘We don’t need no stinkin’ badges,’ right? We’re Men of Letters.”
Dean snorted.
Just then, Prince Tarvek stuck his head around the edge of the bathroom door. “Ah, good, I thought I heard your voices. The shower’s free, if you don’t mind my finishing up at the sink; we shouldn’t waste any time.”
Sam shrugged with his eyebrows and looked at Dean, who said, “Just leave me some hot water.”
Sam huffed in amusement and handed Dean his gun, watch, and pocket contents, then quickly grabbed the essentials out of his go bag, along with his suit pants and shirt, before heading into the bathroom. The shower cubicle didn’t quite look big enough for Sam to feel comfortable sitting down in the front half to take off his boots and socks, but there was a claw-foot tub as well, so he sat down on the edge of that so as to have more maneuvering room.
Prince Tarvek was already halfway dressed and was buttoning his silver-grey shirt. “There are towels in there,” he said, nodding toward the shower. “You can pile the laundry by the tub here; Zoing will see to it while we’re away.”
Sam nodded. “Gotcha.” He set his boots out of the way and added his socks to the laundry pile, then decided to make use of the space while he had it and took off his shirts. When he looked up, however, Prince Tarvek was frowning at him. “What?”
“That’s... an unusual tattoo.” Prince Tarvek put his pince-nez on to get a better look at the starburst-pentangle inked on the left side of Sam’s chest. “Do all Americans have them?”
Sam snorted. “I wish. Would make our job a lot easier if they did.”
“Oh, so it’s not some national symbol or the sign of your house?”
“No, nothing like that. It’s an anti-possession sigil.”
“Ah, I see... professional hazard, being a demon hunter.”
“You could say that.”
“Standard practice?”
Sam stood up and dropped his shirts on the laundry pile. “No, although it probably should be. Dean didn’t think of it until after I’d been possessed the first time.”
Prince Tarvek’s eyes widened. “You’ve-”
“Yeah. Twice.” Sam decided not to factor Gadreel into the equation this time; he hadn’t recovered many memories of the times when the angel had taken control, but it didn’t seem like he’d done anything... unangelic, so to speak.
Prince Tarvek frowned. “Twice?! But if the sigil worked....”
“The second time was Lucifer. He’s still an archangel and had to get my consent, so the sigil didn’t matter. And I only gave my consent so I could throw him back in the Cage.”
“What... what was it like, being possessed?”
Sam frowned. “What?”
“I-I don’t mean how it happened. Obviously, that wouldn’t necessarily be the same in both worlds. But... well, Agatha, you know, was possessed by Lucrezia, and I’m about to go home to a town full of people who’ve been mind-controlled, and... I just... look, Gil accused me of wanting to become Lucrezia’s successor. I don’t. But there are things I hadn’t thought through before that I’m having to consider now, and I just don’t have enough data.”
“Your Highness, I’m not sure you really want to know.”
“I probably don’t. But I believe I need to.”
Sam sighed and tried for the most concise explanation. “All right. Imagine waking up to find that you’d killed Gil and Violetta, feeling yourself beating Agatha to death, watching her bleed out under your hands, and hearing your voice say things to her that you would never in your life want to say to anyone, not even your worst enemy... and there’s not a damn thing you can do to stop it.”
Prince Tarvek paled and steadied himself on the edge of the sink.
Considering the point made, Sam went into the shower cubicle and tried not to think about the taste of blood, the stench of sulfur-anything beyond the task at hand. It didn’t work. By the time he shut the water off, the only thing that felt clean was his skin. Once he was dried off and dressed enough to leave the cubicle, though, he had himself pulled together well enough that he thought he could face the prince again. The startling fact that his new clothes fit perfectly and felt pretty comfortable helped. But he’d resolutely tuned out any noises or smells beyond the shower itself, so it surprised him to find Dean waiting for him by the sink instead of Prince Tarvek.
“Dude,” Dean said quietly, putting down his razor. “What the hell did you say to him?”
“He wanted to know what possession was like,” Sam replied at the same volume.
Dean raised his chin in understanding. “What’d you tell him about?”
“Stull.” There had been horrifying moments in his first possession, too, especially when the demon, Meg, had come close to doing unspeakable things to the brothers’ friend Jo Harvelle; but Dean had put a stop to that, and later Bobby had stopped Meg from killing Dean. Watching Lucifer beat Dean to a bloody pulp on Baby’s hood in Stull Cemetery after killing Cas and Bobby had been orders of magnitude worse. His being able to overpower Lucifer long enough to throw himself into the Cage had been an absolute miracle.
Dean nodded slowly. “Well, it worked. He tossed his cookies. Zoing’s gone to get him some ginger tea.”
“Gonna take a lot more than ginger tea to help the people of Sturmhalten.”
“Yeah. I know.” Dean squeezed Sam’s shoulder and went in to get his own shower.
Sam blew the air out of his cheeks and finished getting ready for the day, wrapping up just about the time Dean finished his shower. But he couldn’t find his boots.
“Lackya took ’em,” Dean explained when Sam asked. “Said the cordwainer had some way to get the dimensions of your feet from the wear pattern.”
“The cordwainer?”
“Don’t look at me, dude. At least you didn’t have to deal with some clank thing grabbin’ your foot to take measurements of.”
Sam huffed a laugh in spite of himself and left the bathroom to find Prince Tarvek, with his shirt only half buttoned and his chin still unshaven, nursing the last of his cup of tea. Zoing was standing by the teapot, ready to pour him another cup. Neither seemed to notice Sam as he put his shaving kit back in his go bag and picked up his vest to put on.
“Hey,” Sam said quietly, shrugging into the vest. “You okay, Your Highness?”
Prince Tarvek sighed without looking up. “No. But perhaps I shouldn’t be.”
Sam didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything.
“Look, Winchester-Sam-I need a favor.”
Sam shrugged and started buttoning the vest. “Shoot.”
“You and your brother seem to have no use for titles and ranks. I find that... rather refreshing at the moment. So please, both of you... call me just plain Tarvek, and ‘dude’ and ‘man’ and whatever else instead of ‘Your Highness.’ I think... I could use the humility.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“Thank you. And thank you for your honesty earlier. You were right; I didn’t want to know. But now I do. And now I know what I must do.”
Sam frowned in concern. “What does that mean?”
Tarvek did look up at that, blinked, and smiled and shook his head. “Oh, don’t worry. I don’t intend to harm myself in any way except maybe politically. I still have every intention of reclaiming the Throne of Lightning. I’ve just realized that there are some prices I’m not willing to pay to get it.”
Sam nodded. “Gotcha.”
Dean came out of the bathroom just then, and at the same time the Lackya returned with new boots for all three men and a gun belt for Sam. Tarvek went in to shave while Sam and Dean finished gearing up, which involved a lot of discussion about the proper way to wear a gun belt under a frock coat when all one had to go on were classic Westerns that the brothers knew from unfortunate experience weren’t accurate and a lot more discussion of whether they ought to worry about their weapons not being period-correct and whether any of the above even mattered when almost everything could be handwaved on account of the Winchesters being the only Americans these people had ever seen. Tarvek came out of the bathroom laughing so hard he was holding his sides.
Then they all put on their suit coats and headed back to Baby, who was being loaded onto a cart and gave them a happy honking-to before playing a few bars of “Come Go with Me.”
“We’re comin’!” Dean called back. “Keep your chrome on.”
That earned him five quick honks that sounded like laughter.
The flight to Mulverschtag was mercifully short and filled mainly by Dean and Tarvek standing in the middle of the cargo hold commiserating about how much they hated flying. Sam took the opportunity to whisper to Baby that she should probably keep mum when they disembarked, and she honked twice quietly in agreement. Then she played the opening of “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron.”
“What-are you asking about Gil?”
Beep-beep.
“We’re meeting him there, remember?”
Beep. “Up in the sky, a man in a plane....”
“Oh. I haven’t heard, but we would have if anything was wrong.”
Beep-beep.
“Approaching Mulverschtag, my lords,” called someone from the bridge.
Baby held her doors open, and the three men got in, although Tarvek still looked a little spooked by her. The airship touched down in the town square a minute or so later, and Baby rolled out of the hold and over to the bat-winged flyer, where Gil was talking with a couple of very large Jägers in red uniforms. Tarvek heaved an audible sigh of relief.
“Everything went like clockwork,” Gil reported as they got out and the airship crew began loading the flyer into the cargo hold. “The Sturmhalteners should be arriving in a few minutes. Sam, Dean, I don’t think you’ve met Gen. Khrizhan and Gen. Goomblast. Gentlemen, Sam and Dean Winchester from America. They’re here to help Agatha.”
“Vell, vell!” said Gen. Khrizhan, whose gold-capped tusks and gruff voice were a little intimidating despite his friendly smile. “Zo hyu iz de boyz vot kilt der batterink ram?”
Dean cleared his throat and squared his shoulders. “Uh, yes, sir.”
“Goot, goot. Und now hyu help uz fight De Odder’s bogs, yah?”
“Yes, sir. That’s why we’re here.”
Sam nodded his agreement.
“Verra goot!” boomed Gen. Goomblast, whose sharp-toothed smile was practically Leviathan-wide. “Our Heterodyne needz all de allies she ken get!”
“Hoy,” Gen. Khrizhan interrupted, sobering as he looked past the brothers. “Der Storm King looks a leetle green.”
Frowning in concern, Sam turned to Tarvek, who really did look pretty grey of face out here in the sunlight. Sam had thought it was just the reflection off his shirt, but that would be muted now that he had his red suit coat on. The passing shadow of the departing airship didn’t change that perception.
But Tarvek managed a wan smile and a slight chuckle. “Not as green as I was a couple of days ago. I’ll make it. Mr. Winchester just gave me some information that will make me a better king, that’s all. So, what’s the plan?”
Gil looked worried, but he answered, “Well, the Jägers are sending a messenger back to Mechanicsburg to get Agatha’s permission for them to help us track down the Geisterdamen. Your people, as I said, should be arriving any time now. And the innkeeper here”-he pointed to a tavern a few doors down that had a balcony overlooking the square-“said you can use his balcony if you want to make an address.”
Tarvek nodded slowly, looking up at the balcony. “Yes. Yes, I think I’d better. And I want you and the Winchesters up there with me.”
Gil blinked. “What? Why?”
“Trust me.”
“I don’t think I-”
Tarvek looked Gil in the eye. “Trust me.”
Gil sighed. “All right, fine. Don’t make me regret this.”
Sam wasn’t sure who was trying harder not to make a smart remark, Dean or Baby. Either way, there wasn’t really time for one; it sounded like the Sturmhalteners were just a few streets away. So Tarvek took a deep breath and headed for the tavern, and Gil and the Winchesters followed him inside and upstairs to the door that led to the balcony. Baby and the Jägers followed, too, though judging from what Sam could hear behind him, they were stationing themselves outside the tavern as people began filling the square and the Jägers instructed them to wait.
“Tarvek,” Gil said quietly, “just so you know, I don’t have casualty estimates yet, but... your losses were pretty heavy. I gave orders that the dead be returned to Sturmhalten for burial.”
Eyes shutting in pain, Tarvek bowed his head and braced himself against the door with his left hand. After a moment, though, he hauled in a deep breath and nodded. “Thank you.”
“You sure about this?” Dean asked Tarvek as he straightened.
“No,” Tarvek admitted. “But Gil was right. My people need me.”
Gil definitely looked worried at that. But Sam, who had stationed himself at a window, noticed that the crowd noise was pretty muted, all things considered. There wasn’t much talking; in fact, most of what he could hear were sniffles and sobs. This crowd wasn’t going to be inclined to turn into a mob, no matter what Tarvek said.
Then again, Tarvek was supposed to be the Storm King... and green clouds usually went before hail and even tornadoes. There was no telling what was about to happen.
“They’re ready,” Sam reported when it looked like the last of the crowd had arrived.
Tarvek looked at Gil, still plainly heartsick. “Stand with me, Gil. Please.”
Gil hesitated, then nodded. “All right.”
Tarvek nodded back, pulled himself together with another deep breath, and opened the door. He and Gil walked out together, with Gil to Tarvek’s left; Dean fell in two steps back to Gil’s left, and Sam two steps back to Tarvek’s right. Sam was thus able to see when Tarvek’s stride faltered briefly and his shoulders slumped minutely upon his first sight of the size of the crowd, which didn’t look very big to Sam. But that moment of defeat was barely the space of two heartbeats. Then Tarvek’s shoulders squared again, and his face seemed to set in determination as he walked up to the balcony rail. Gil stopped a couple of steps behind Tarvek, and Sam and Dean stopped when Gil did.
“People of Sturmhalten,” Tarvek began, his voice carrying effortlessly. “We have all lost a great deal these last days. My father is dead. My sister is dead. Many of your friends and family are dead. And those of you here have lost a measure of innocence you may not have known was yours to lose.
“But those losses are not the fault of the Wulfenbach Empire,” he went on, startling Gil. “The groundwork was laid many years ago and built upon by my father and his friends. None of these things would have been possible without the evils wrought by The Other-Lucrezia Mongfish.”
Gasps of horror went up across the square.
“I do not know how I can repair the damage done to each of you by my family,” Tarvek continued. “But this much I can do. I hereby denounce the Lady Lucrezia and all her works. I renounce all ties my family has held to the Geisterdamen and to Lucrezia’s servants among the Knights of Jove. And I swear before God and all of you that I will help my friend, Baron Gilgamesh Wulfenbach”-here he pulled Gil forward and put his hand on Gil’s shoulder-“along with the Lady Agatha Heterodyne and her servants and friends, including the Jägers and the Men of Letters, to hunt down and destroy all remnants of Lucrezia’s work, to free people infected with slaver wasps whose infection has not made them obvious revenants, and to restore the peace of Europa.” He paused, swallowed hard, and concluded, “May God forgive us and help us all.”
The sniffling grew louder.
As Tarvek stepped back, Gil cleared his throat. “People of Sturmhalten, you know how my father treated rebels, but what you have done was not by choice, and no punishment I could devise can possibly be worse than the memories you will have to live with. I hold you blameless and accept Prince Tarvek’s vow of friendship and assistance. Wulfenbach and Heterodyne forces will accompany you back to Sturmhalten, both to ensure your safe conduct and to stand ready should our investigation into the late Prince Aaronev’s work with Lucrezia Mongfish reveal information that requires immediate action. Go home and mourn, but do not fear reprisal.”
About half the crowd broke down at that and wept. Gil and Tarvek looked at each other and turned to go inside, flanked by the Winchesters.
As Dean closed the door behind them, Gil looked at Tarvek again and said, “You may have just committed suicide.”
Tarvek’s dark eyes flashed. “If the Knights of Jove think they can kill me now, they’ve got another think coming. But even if they succeed, at least I’ll die knowing I did the right thing.”
“And invoking God?”
“Let’s say I’m... reconsidering my atheism.”
Gil pondered that a moment, then smiled a little and clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Sam and Dean exchanged a look and followed them down the stairs.
“I still reserve the right to kill you myself if necessary,” Gil added, giving Tarvek a friendly jostle.
Tarvek managed to chuckle. “Oho, just you try.”
Sam and Dean exchanged another look and barely managed not to laugh out loud. They all had their game faces back on as they reached the tavern’s front door, however, and somehow it seemed appropriate to be getting into their big black car given the somber mood of the crowd. The innkeeper handed Dean a basket of food on the way out and refused to accept payment, even from Gil. Baby held her doors open for them, and the Jäger generals promised to follow with the civilians. So in they got, and Dean followed Tarvek’s directions to get out of town, going slowly not only to let the Sturmhalteners keep up but also out of caution because of the aftermath of the slime monster battle up ahead.
Baby managed to hold her peace until they got out of town. But then she switched on her radio and burst into... “Snoopy’s Christmas.”
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