Dead Man's rain m-2

by Frank Tuttle

  Dead Man's rain

  ( Markhat - 2 )

  Frank Tuttle

  Frank Tuttle

  Dead Man's Rain

  Chapter One

  Noon found me standing at the edge of a fresh-dug grave. Sunlight mocked and set the blue jays to singing, but couldn’t quite reach the Sarge’s casket, no matter how hard the sun shone.

  I crumbled a damp clod of earth, let it fall.

  We’d lived through the War, the Sarge and I. Lived through the three-month siege at Ghant. Lived through the fall of Little Illa. Lived through two years in the swamps. I’d once seen the Sarge snatch an arrow out of the air and shove it in a charging Troll’s eye, and now he was dead after slipping and falling in a public bath.

  “Bye, Sarge,” I said. “You deserved better.”

  I met an Orthodox priest as I walked away. He dipped his red mask in greeting and slowed to a traipse, but I fixed my eyes on a big old pin oak and marched past. I’d said all my words, and had no use for his.

  I was halfway to the cemetery gates when Mama Hog stepped out of the shadow of a poor man’s headstone and planted herself squat and square in my path.

  And that’s when it started. I knew before she spoke what she was going to say. And I knew that I should have just keep walking, ignoring her like I did the priest, ignoring everything and everybody except a bar-keep named One-Eyed Eddie and his endless supply of tall, cold glasses. The Sarge was dead and I turned forty with the sunrise and the Hell with everything else.

  But I stopped. “What is it, Mama?” I said, gazing out over the neat, still ranks of sad-eyed angels and tall white grave-wards. “Come to pick out a spot?”

  Mama grinned up at me with all three of her best teeth.

  “Come to find you, boy,” she said. “Come to send you some business.”

  “The only kind of business I need now is the kind Eddie runs,” I said. “Anything else can wait.”

  Mama frowned. “This ain’t any old business,” she said, shaking a stubby finger at my navel. “This is Hill business.”

  Behind us, the first spade of dirt hit the Sarge’s coffin with a muted, faraway thump.

  “Hill business,” I said. “One of your rich ladies need a finder?”

  Mama’s card-and-potion shop does a brisk business when sleek black carriages that hurry to her curb disgorge Hill ladies wrapped in more cloaks and veils than the weather truly demands. I don’t know how Mama attracts such well-heeled clients, but she does, and more than twice a week.

  Mama Hog cackled. “Rich widow, boy. Rich widow.” She grinned and shook her head. “She needs more than a finder, I reckon, but you’re the best I can do.”

  The thump-thumps of earth on coffin came faster now. I squinted toward the gate, not wanting the Sarge’s widow to catch me in the graveyard. Outsiders aren’t welcome at Orthodox funerals, and the service would begin as soon as the coffin lid was fully covered with earth.

  I sighed. “Let’s walk, Mama,” I said. “You can tell me on the way.”

  Thump-thump. Another shovel rose and fell.

  “He was a good man, your Sergeant,” said Mama. She fell in step beside me. “No words taste more bitter than goodbye.”

  “Tell me about my new client, Mama,” I said. “What’s her name, how high up the Hill is her house, and what does she want me to do about her dear sweet Nephew Pewsey and that awful conniving gypsy girl?”

  Mama Hog chuckled. “Her name,” she said, “is Merlat.”

  Behind us, after a while, I heard the Sarge’s widow start to cry.

  The Widow Merlat sat across from me, breathed through her scented silk hanky, and did her best to make it plain she wasn’t one of those Hill snobs who think of us common folk as mere servant-fodder. No, I was all right in her book-not a human being like her, of course, but as long as I kept my eyes on the floor and knocked the horse flop off my boots, I’d be welcome at her servant’s entrance any day.

  “You come highly recommended, goodman Markhat,” she said, daring Rannit’s unfashionable south-side air long enough to lower her hanky while she spoke. “The most capable, most experienced finder in all of Rannit. I’m told you are discreet, as well. I would not be here otherwise.”

  I sighed. My head hurt and I still had cemetery dirt on my shoes. I did not need to have my face rubbed in my humble origins by a Hill widow who doubtlessly thought her son was the first rich boy to ever take a fancy to the half-elf parlor maid.

  “I’m also told you are expensive,” said the widow. She plopped a fat black clutch purse down on my desk, and it tinkled, heavy with coin. “Good,” she added. “I’ve never trusted bargains, nor shopped for them. Money means nothing to me.”

  “Funny you should say that, Lady Merlat,” I said. “Why, just the other day I was telling the Regent that money means twenty jerks a day, to me. Plus expenses. And that’s only if I decide to take the job.” I leaned back in my chair and clasped my hands behind my head. “And, despite your generous display of the money that means nothing to you, I haven’t said yes yet.”

  The widow smiled a tight, small smile. “You will, finder,” she said. “I’ll pay thirty crowns a day. Forty. Fifty. Whatever it takes, I will pay.”

  Outside, an ogre huffed and puffed as he pulled a manure wagon down the street, and all the silk in Hent wasn’t going to keep the stench out of the widow’s Hill-bred nostrils.

  The widow shoved her purse my way. I shoved it back.

  “Tell me what you want,” I said.

  She nodded, once and quickly, and took a deep breath. A hint of color fought its way past the powder on her cheeks.

  “My husband is dead,” she said.

  She was wearing more black than a barge-load of undertakers. “No,” I said, straight-faced. “How long?”

  “Two years,” she said. More color leaked through. “Two years. He caught fever.” The widow’s voice went thin. “He caught fever and he died and I buried him.” She took in a ragged breath. “But now he’s back, goodman. Returned.”

  “Returned?” I lifted an eyebrow. “How? Rattling chains, wearing a bed-sheet?” I stood. “Nice talking to you, Lady.”

  Her small bright eyes got smaller and brighter. “Sit,” she hissed. “I am neither senile nor insane. My husband has returned. He walks the grounds at night. He rattles the windows, pulls at all the doors. All but four of the staff left after his second visit.” The widow Merlat gave her hanky a savage twist. “I had to hire caterers for the Armistice Day Festival,” she said. “The canapes were spoiled, and two of my guests fell ill after sampling the stuffed mushrooms.”

  “Tragic,” I said. “Shocking. And the wine?”

  “Goodman Markhat,” she said. “Are you mocking me?”

  I sighed, eyed the coin-purse, sat. “Lady Merlat,” I said, “this sounds like a matter for the Watch, or the Church, or both. Why me? What can I do that they can’t?”

  She twisted her hanky and chose her words. “The Watch. The Church. Don’t you think I tried, goodman? Don’t you think I tried?”

  “I don’t know, Lady,” I said. “Did you?”

  She glared. “Sixty crowns a day,” she said.

  “So your husband is a revenant,” I said, slowly. “And he’s tracking up the flower beds and scaring the neighbors and the coachman is also the butler and nobody can cook a decent meal.”

  “Sixty-five crowns,” she said, her voice glacial, to match her eyes. “Seventy, if you vow to hold your tongue.”

  I grinned. “Sixty-five it is,” I said. “And I need to make one thing perfectly clear, Lady Merlat. I saw a lot of folks get suddenly, tragically dead during the War. What I didn’t see was anybody walking around afterward complaining about it.”

  “You doubt m
y word?”

  “I believe you believe, but that doesn’t make it the truth,” I said. “Have you seen your husband, Lady Markhat? Really seen him?”

  She shuddered, and went corpse-pale underneath the powder. “Once,” she said in a whisper. “The second time. I’d moved upstairs, kept the windows shuttered and bolted. But I heard the dogs barking and Harl, the footman, shouting and I peeked outside and there he was, standing there, looking up at me.” She shivered all over, fought it off. “It was him, goodman Markhat. Two years in the grave-but it was Ebed.”

  She hesitated. And then she lowered the hanky and looked me in the eye. “Please,” she said, and the word stuck in her throat, so she repeated it. “Please.”

  “All right, Lady,” I said. “All right.” I opened my desk, pulled out a pad of ragged pulp-paper and a pair of brass dipping-pens. “I’ll do this much. I’ll try to find out who or what you saw,” I said. “Give it three days. If I come up empty, you only owe me for two.”

  “I saw my husband,” said the widow. “I saw him, and others have seen him, and I’ll pay you sixty-five crowns a day to find out why he has returned, and how I can put him to rest.”

  I sighed. “I need to know a few things, Lady Merlat,” I said. “Names, dates, addresses. And the location of your husband’s tomb.”

  She found a fresh hanky and took a big breath.

  Revenants and funerals and aching in the head.

  Happy birthday to me.

  Rannit awoke around me. Ogres huffed and puffed as they passed, their dray-carts empty but not for long. Bakers and butchers and tailors yawned, pulled back their shutters, propped open their doors. Blue-suited Watchmen worked the alleys in pairs, kicking and poking and pulling at bits of garbage to see if the bodies beneath were sleeping off cheap wine or going stiff and still.

  I passed a parked undertaker’s wagon, giving the tarp-covered, black bed of it wide berth. Those lumps under the tarp would be Curfew breakers, bound for the tall grey cinder-brick smokestacks of the crematoriums down by the river. The Watch is careful to find the bodies before dark, before they rise again.

  The only vampires we tolerate in Rannit have tailor-made cloaks and big houses on the Hill.

  The undertaker grinned and tipped his crooked stovepipe hat as I walked past. I crossed the street in a hurry, risked a trampling by the hurried ogres, took a shortcut through the Carnival just to watch the yawning clowns cuss and smoke and stomp around in their big red shoes.

  I passed the ragged tents of the Carnival, kept walking. The streets began to slope down, toward the river. The air went thick with the stench of the slaughterhouses and the leather tanneries and the paper mills. Big sixteen-horse lumber wagons thundered past, their wheels striking sparks on the broken, rutted cobblestones.

  There, in the shadow of the crematorium smokestacks, one of the widow’s coins bought me a rickshaw to Market Street, a cab to the good side of the Riverfront district, and a full-blown brass-and-velvet carriage with glass in the windows and cushions on the seats for the ride across the Brown River and onto the Hill.

  My carriage clattered on to the New Bridge, nearly ran down the slowest of the traditional trio of clowns who capered and danced at each end. They scattered, cursing, as the driver snapped his reigns and the team’s hooves clop-clopped sharply on the fresh cobbles. The bridge arched up and Brown River fell away below, until we rose over the water so high it actually sparkled and the stench of the cattle-barges was lost in the wind.

  I grinned and waved at strangers. Carriages and coins, like the song says-I was having wild fantasies about new shoes, and a haircut.

  I wasn’t fooling the carriage driver, though. He kept his lips pinched and his shaggy grey eyebrows curled in a scowl and when he called me “Sir,” he let me know he’d rather be using more colorful honorifics. He had me made for a burglar or a pimp or a blackmailer, out for a lark in the Heights, pockets full of ill-gotten gain.

  “Sir,” he said, using his special tone again. “Will you be entering the grounds of the Merlat estate, or should I pull to the tradesman’s entrance at the rear?”

  “You are an amusing wight,” I said with a small laugh. “Tradesman’s entrance, indeed. Haw-haw.” I let him stew.

  “Just drive past, won’t you?” I said. “I need a good look at the grounds. Especially things like doors, gates, dog kennels. A man in my line has to know these things before he goes to work.”

  He shut up and drove.

  Massive oaks lined the streets, wide green lawns flanked the sidewalks and huge old pre-War mansions loomed up like slate-roofed mountains against the cool blue sky. The air smelled of cut grass and honeysuckle. No potholes in the cobblestone streets, no filth choking the gutters, no bodies, sleeping or otherwise, sprawled on the sidewalks-my, what a gulf the Brown River spans.

  I checked street-side ward-posts for brass-wrought house numbers. Three-forty-four was a four-storied behemoth with gingerbread trim and arrowhead turrets.

  Three-forty-five looked like a wedding cake with doors.

  Three-forty-six, three-forty-seven-and there it was, three-forty-eight.

  House Merlat. I whistled and gawked.

  The front lawn was ten acres, every inch of it lush and verdant. Flowerbeds and walking gardens lined the yard and the paved carriage track. Blue spallow and red highland roses and white ardenia waved in the breeze-all the colors of Rannit’s flag.

  Lurking here and there amidst the shrubs and flowers was an assortment of pigeon-spotted ornamental statuary-knights of old with swords uplifted, ruined columns surrounding pools filled with water-lilies, the odd sad angel in flowing Old Kingdom robes. A squirrel fussed at me from atop a knight’s armored head.

  A dozen blood-oaks and a lone gnarled madbark tree shaded the angels and the flowers. And though someone had mowed the lawn recently, oak leaves lay where they fell. Between the unraked leaves and the early signs of shagginess in the untrimmed hedges and the walking corpses in the yard after dark, I imagined that the widow’s neighbors were waxing quite peevish.

  Above the flowers and the shrubs and the oaks, though, loomed House Merlat itself.

  Five stories. Four towers. Doors the size of garrison gates, windows of leaded glass, again worked with the form of Rannit’s standard and a shield-and-gryphon design that I took to be the sigil of House Merlat. The gutters and roofs were copper, green with age; the walls soot-stained granite behind a growth of unkempt ivy.

  I made a quick count, found twenty-two windows on the street-face of the bottom floor alone. Twenty-two windows, and all but one of them shuttered and barred.

  “Cheerful little hut,” I said. My driver grunted.

  We passed it by. I had the driver turn and pass again, ignoring his subtle commentary about prisons and the Watch.

  “Well, well,” I muttered. “Look at that.”

  Ward-walls. I’d missed both of them the first time, too bedazzled by visions of the good life to see the telltale signs of spiked iron behind the fireflowers that bordered the Merlat lawn. I squinted, counted spikes and saw that every fifth fence-spike sported a fist-sized ball of smoky glass. The glass would glow faintly after dark-and anyone walking too close would be treated to a fatal bolt of rich man’s lightning.

  The ward-walls were new, I judged. The Merlat’s rows of fireflowers, obviously planted to hide the ranks of ugly iron spikes, were all white and blue, with none of the red petals that show up after the second season.

  We were only barely past when a flat, open delivery wagon, its bed filled with thick wrought-iron door and window bars worked in intricate oak-leaf patterns, pulled into the drive of the Merlat’s southern neighbors. A gang of carpenters emerged from a hedge-maze, all wiping their hands on their pants and grabbing up their tools.

  Ward-walls. Bars on the windows, bars on the doors-all done in a hurry, too. The Merlat’s neighbors weren’t happy. You’d think a family of sidhe had just moved in.

  Or, perhaps, a well-heeled revenant.
/>   “Driver,” I said, shaking my head. “Let’s head for Monument Hill. I think I’ll lay out flowers on dear old ‘Nuncle’ Tim.”

  He snorted and snapped his reigns and didn’t even bother with a “Sir.”

  Cost him his tip, that bit of cheek.

  Curfew in Rannit falls with the sun. The night belongs to the half-dead, the Watch and anybody crazy enough to risk running afoul of the former or tripping over the recumbent, snoring forms of the latter.

  Curfew fell, and the big old bells on the Square clanged nine times. Before the last notes had faded Mama Hog herself was yelling “Boy, wake up,” and banging on my door.

  I swung my feet off my desk, put my sandwich down on a plate and hurried to the door.

  Mama Hog looked up and grinned. “The Widow Merlat found you,” she said, not asking but reporting.

  “She did indeed,” I said, opening the door. “What a chucklesome old dear. She’s coming by later for tea and a seance.”

  Mama cackled and trundled inside. “The Widow Merlat’s got the fear, boy,” she said. “Got it bad.” Mama plopped down into my client’s chair and started eyeing my sandwich.

  “You make that?”

  “It’s from Eddie’s,” I said. “Tear off a hunk.”

  She tore, bit, chewed.

  “You sent me a lunatic, Mama,” I said, shaking my finger. “Shame on you.”

  Bite, chew, swallow. Then Mama wiped her lips on her sleeve and grinned. “She ain’t crazy, boy,” Mama said. “She’s ec-cen-tric. Ain’t that the word for rich folks?”

  “She thinks her dead husband spends his evening knock-knock-knocking at her door,” I said. “Eccentric doesn’t cover that, Mama, and you know it.”

  Mama shrugged and chewed.

  “I have no love for the idle rich,” I said. “But I’ve got no desire to fleece sad old widow women, either.” I went behind my desk, pulled back my chair and sat. “Why not send her to a doctor or a priest, Mama?” I said. “Why me? Why a finder?”