Carpe Jugulum

all its odiferous splendor. It was the bane of Shawn’s life. All the keep’s garderobes discharged into it. One of his jobs was to clean it out and take the contents to the pits in the gardens where Verence’s efforts at composting were gradually turning them into, well, Lancre. * But now that the castle was a lot busier than it used to be his weekly efforts with shovel and wheelbarrow weren’t the peaceful and solitary interludes they had been. Of course he’d let the job sort of…pile up these last few weeks, but did they expect him to do everything ?
    He waved Big Jim toward the door at the bottom of the tower. Fortunately, trolls have not much interest in organic odors, although they can easily distinguish types of limestone by smell.
    “I want you to open it when I say,” he said, tearing a strip off his shirt and wrapping it around an arrow. He searched his pockets for a match. “And when you’ve opened the door,” he went on, as the cloth caught, “I want you to run away very, very fast, right? Okay…open the door!”
    Big Jim pulled at the handle. There was a very faint whoosh as the door swung back.
    “Run!” Shawn shouted. He drew back the bowstring, and fired through the doorway.
    The flaming arrow vanished into the noisome darkness. There was a pause of a few heartbeats. Then the tower exploded.
    It happened quite slowly. The green-blue light mushroomed up from story to story in an almost leisurely way, blowing out stones at every level to give the tower a nice sparkling effect. The roofing leads opened up like a daisy. A faint flame speared the clouds. Then time, sound and motion came back with a thump.
    After a few seconds the main doors burst open and the soldiers ran out. The first one was smacked between the eyes by a ballistic king.
    Shawn had just started to run back to the fight when someone landed on his shoulders, bearing him to the ground.
    “Well, well, one of the toy soldiers,” sneered Corporal Svitz, leaping up and drawing his sword.
    As he raised it Shawn rolled and struck upward with the Lancrastian Peace-time Army Knife. He might have had time to select the Device for DFissecting Paradoxes, or the Appli-ance for Detecting Small Grains of Hope, or the Spiral Thing for Ascertaining the Reality of Being, but as it happened it was the Instrument for Ending Arguments Very Quickly that won the day.
    Presently, there came a short sharp shower of soft rain.
    Well…certainly a shower.
    Definitely soft, anyway.

Agnes hadn’t seen a mob like this before. Mobs, in her limited experience, were noisy. This one was silent. Most of the town was in it, and to Agnes’s surprise they’d brought along many of the children.
    It didn’t surprise Perdita. They’re going to kill the vampires , she said, and the children will watch.
    Good, thought Agnes, that’s exactly right.
    Perdita was horrified. It’ll give them nightmares!
    No, thought Agnes. It’ll take the nightmares away. Sometimes, everyone has to know the monster is dead, and remember, so that they can tell their grandchildren.
    “They tried to turn people into things,” she said aloud.
    “Sorry, miss?” said Piotr.
    “Oh…just thinking aloud.”
    And where had she got that other idea, Perdita wondered, the one where she’d told the villagers to send runners out to other towns to report on the night’s work. That was unusually nasty of her.
    But she remembered the look of horror on the mayor’s face, and, later, the blank engrossed expression when he was trying to throttle the Count with his chain of office. The vampire had killed him with a blow that had almost broken him in half.
    She fingered the wounds on her neck. She was pretty certain vampires didn’t miss, but Vlad must have done, because she clearly wasn’t a vampire. She didn’t even like the idea of rare steak. She’d tried to see if she could fly, when she thought people weren’t looking, but she was as attractive to gravity as ever. The blood-sucking…no, never that, even if it was the ultimate diet program, but she’d have liked the flying.
    It’s changed you, said Perdita.
    “How?”
    “Sorry, miss?”
    You’re sharper…edgier…nastier.
    “Maybe it’s about time I was, then.”
    “Sorry, miss?”
    “Oh, nothing. Do you have a spare sickle?”

The vampires traveled fast but erratically, appearing not so much to fly as to be promising entries in the world long-jump championships.
    “We’ll burn that ungrateful place to the