Bell Weather

by Dennis Mahoney

  “And break my neck while you’re at it,” Nabby said, “and then you’ll have a broke-neck cook and a poor tongueless wretch and I should like to see you keep an orderly tavern after that.”

  Nabby hated leaving the kitchen in the rear of the tavern without serious reason, but Tom knew her well enough to sense her irritation came from more than her abandonment of vittles at the hearth. She was shaken by the Maimers, and the victim, and the blood, and she was angry at herself for being so affected.

  “The child is vexed. You know she fears blood,” Nabby said, referring to the tavern ghost, a girl who remembered little of her earthly life except for a mother who had loved her, killed her, or possibly both. Nameless and invisible, she had lived in the Orange for a decade, and Nabby alone claimed to understand the knocks, creaks, and ethereal odors with which the ghost communicated. Tom could feel her now: a troubling air more like memory than ordinary sense, a fragrance in his thoughts that reminded him of loss.

  Benjamin walked up behind them, stepping gracefully around Nabby and her bucket. He and Tom entered an upstairs room at the side of the tavern—dark and unfurnished but for a bed—that was usually reserved for vagabonds or prisoners. It was dim and low-ceilinged, and the window had bars. Tom’s cousin Bess rushed to meet them at the door. She was twenty and petite, her honey-brown hair stuffed inside a cap, and he tensed to see her apron and her hands smeared with blood. Her eyes were wide and teary but she held herself straight.

  “Excuse me, Bess,” Benjamin said, passing through directly to the victim on the bed.

  “Are you all right?” Tom asked his cousin.

  Bess nodded unconvincingly. The smell of blood and herbs mingled with her warmth. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. “Go and clean yourself up.”

  She set her feet and wiped her fingers on her apron. “I can stay.”

  “There’s nothing you can do now that Benjamin’s here. I need you downstairs—”

  Contradicting him at once, Benjamin said from the back of the room, “Bess, my dear—I need a fresh pair of rags, absolutely clean. Boil them first, lift them with a clean-boiled fork, and hold them out to cool in the breeze. Do not touch them with your hands.” It was a point he always stressed—cleanliness, cleanliness—and although he was often mocked for such a curious insistence, people humored him, encouraged by his regular success. “Also ice,” Benjamin said, “and a bowl of moistened raspberry leaves, softly crushed.”

  She ran downstairs and Tom entered the room, just as Ichabod—unnoticed until that moment—opened the shutters to illuminate the victim on the bed.

  The man looked drained of all his fluids, his complexion gray-green from the blood he must have swallowed. Bess had cleaned his chin but his neck was sticky dark. He had arrived completely naked and been dressed in a set of Tom’s old clothes, which were long and ill-fitting. Ichabod held a basin under his mouth, allowing him to murmur out another pitiful flow. He looked from Benjamin to Tom with large blue eyes and seemed aghast that he could neither apologize for the mess nor offer a description of his terrible ordeal.

  “It’s all right,” Tom said quietly. He touched the man’s trembling shoulder and added, “You’re in excellent hands. Dr. Knox is the best physician I know. I’ve seen him save a man who lost a portion of his skull. You’re welcome to stay as long as you need, and if there’s anything I can do—”

  He stopped before the words “go ahead and ask,” regretting how ridiculously formal he had sounded.

  The victim answered with a blink, drooled into the basin, and looked at Benjamin with tears running to his jowls. Ichabod rubbed the man’s back, and the sight of them together, the lifelong mute and the one just created, was as torturously sweet as treacle-berry seeds.

  After a long, close inspection of the man’s severed tongue, Benjamin said, “The worst of the bleeding is over. The cut is very neat, exceedingly so. Your assailants, it would seem, used a well-honed blade. You will still be able to speak, at least in altered fashion. Consonants will be difficult and flavors may be lost. But all in all—”

  The man wept in earnest, sounding like a ewe. Benjamin propped him up, regretful but exhibiting a doctor’s firm support.

  “First you need fluids to restore what you have lost, blended with a tincture that will moderate the pain. Bring me a long-necked funnel,” Benjamin said to Tom, “and a mixture of cider and smoak, one cup each, a measure of powdered cranch root, a pinch of salt, a quarter cup of sugar, and a half pint of rum. Mull it with a red-hot poker. I will add my own draft once the mixture has cooled.”

  Tom nodded and winced—the cranch root alone was enough to turn his stomach—but Benjamin was quick to add, “Even without the funnel, he would not be able to taste it.”

  The patient cried anew. Ichabod consoled him.

  Tom went to the stairs and Pitt was coming up. Nabby had already left. The stairs were free of blood but Pitt had tracked another round of mud from outside, having failed to wipe his feet, let alone knock.

  “You here to question him, too?” Tom asked.

  Pitt stopped and squinted. There were eight steps between them in the stairway’s gloom.

  Tom refused to move and said, “I knew it wasn’t done. I told you they’d attack again as soon as winter was over.”

  “It isn’t your concern,” Pitt said.

  “The hell it ain’t. It’s scaring travelers, hurting business. There’s a man upstairs bleeding in my clothes. This is everyone’s concern, especially here in Root where we have to pay a sheriff who’s afraid to earn his coin.”

  Pitt took a step and seemed to painfully restrain himself. “I’ve ridden out a dozen times.”

  “And ridden home with nothing. If I kept the tavern the way you keep the law—”

  Tom hesitated, thinking he had made Pitt hiss. Rather it was Scratch, the cat who stalked the Orange. He’d been hiding on a step between the men without a sound and now he crouched, fierce and mangy, and defended his position. He was missing half an ear and had a milky left eye, and his decrepit coat was battle scarred and stank of rotting offal. Scratch vanished and appeared several times a week and threatened man, woman, and child with bites, sprays, scratches, and underfoot tangles that occurred too often not to be intentional. Tom had known the cat since time out of mind. According to Nabby, the oldest woman in Root, Scratch had been around since she was a girl. The sole explanation for the cat’s longevity—excluding the assumption that the creature was demonic—was that every ten or fifteen years for nearly a century, Scratch had spawned an identical heir, who presumably killed his parents and returned, by feral instinct, to terrorize the Orange.

  “Someone ought to shoot that cat,” Pitt said.

  “People have tried.”

  A drunk militiaman had done so once and everyone present had sworn he hit the mark. Four weeks later, Scratch reappeared, spry as ever, and stole a sausage before Nabby could impale him with her toasting fork.

  “I’m coming up,” Pitt said, seemingly to Scratch, who occupied the center of the stairs and wouldn’t budge.

  Much as Tom would have savored seeing Pitt maneuver past, he took a breath and said, “The man can’t speak. Benjamin is with him. Do your job and check the road and come back later.”

  “You know damn well the Maimers will be gone.” Pitt said it with a strain of genuine frustration, like a hunter with a quarry that he can’t begin to track. “I won’t keep riding out blind. I need the eyes and ears of people who have met them. You have to let me up.”

  “I won’t.”

  “This is a public tavern,” Pitt said.

  “This is my private house.”

  Before Pitt could answer, Scratch attacked his leg, bloodying his stocking and raking his hands whenever he tried to wrest the creature off. The sheriff drew his gun and swung it like a hammer. Scratch jumped away; Pitt struck his own shin. He groaned and cocked the pistol, aiming at the cat, who retreated to the step whe
re he’d originally been.

  “Put it down,” Tom said, “before you terrify a man who’s already lost his tongue. Go and catch a Maimer, if it’s truly your concern.”

  Pitt lowered the gun. He was too dignified to spit at the cat but openly considered it, sucking in his cheeks and staring at Tom as if he, and not Scratch, had torn his favorite stocking. “I’m coming back,” he said. “And I will shoot this cat and anyone else who comes between me and the fellow upstairs.”

  Then he drew himself tall, like a pillar of the town, and strode out of the tavern to organize another futile sortie into the forest.

  “Good cat,” Tom said.

  Scratch slashed the air and made Tom flinch before scrambling downstairs and darting out of sight.

  “Tom,” Benjamin said, suddenly behind him. “I need a quill and paper. Our man would like to tell us who he is and how it happened.”

  * * *

  His name was John Pale, he was a lawyer out of Grayport, and he had written his story down before exhaustion overcame him. The ink was smudged and the sheet was dotted with blood, but his handwriting was beautifully refined and his account, however hasty, exhibited candor and clarity. Now the paper lay on a table near the front window of the Orange’s taproom, where Benjamin sat looking thoughtfully into the night, while Tom prepared them each a hot cup of smoak.

  Fire rippled in the great stone hearth, providing the room’s only light aside from a candle at Benjamin’s table. Nabby had retired to her bedroom off the kitchen, Ichabod was in his room upstairs overlooking the river, and Bess had forgone her own bed to sleep in a chair beside John Pale. Benjamin had used the raspberry leaves as an astringent and largely stopped the bleeding. They had poured the hideous draft directly into the patient’s stomach with the funnel, and once the added medicine had dulled the worst of the pain, he had finally fallen asleep. The day had passed with few additional travelers, but many townspeople had come to the tavern for news of the latest attack. Sheriff Pitt and a band of armed companions had ridden into the forest and returned empty-handed, Tom had gone about his usual work, and Benjamin, having done all he could for John Pale, had seen to other patients and returned to the Orange after dark to sit with his friend and talk, at last, of Molly and the Maimers.

  Tom stirred the boiling water into the freshly ground smoaknuts and set a pair of cups upon the table. He snipped tobacco from a twist, stuffed two pipes, and handed one to Benjamin. They lit them from the candle and puffed until a cloud swirled above their heads, where it mingled with the rosemary hanging from the rafters. Instead of speaking right away, they settled back and savored the quiet of the taproom with its dark wooden walls, its deeply scarred tables, and its permanent smell of woodsmoke, cinnamon, and bacon.

  Tom picked the paper up and read it once more. John Pale had left Grayport on horseback the previous morning. The road remained in poor condition—passable, but slow—and he had made such terrible time that he’d been forced to spend the night at Shepherd’s Inn, a small but honest house ten leagues away from Root. Just after sunrise, he reembarked and was stopped by a group of riders halfway between the inn and the Orange. They were five in number—one more than last year’s reports of the Maimers—and wore identical black cloaks, tricornes, and masks. The masks were plain and hid their faces from their noses to their hats.

  One of the five, the only one who spoke, barred the way with two of his companions while the other pair of riders blocked the road behind. The speaker asked John his name and destination. The lawyer had heard of last year’s attacks and answered at length, offering not only his name but also the reason for his journey, his occupational history, how much money he was carrying—barely worth the trouble, they were welcome to it all—the name and pedigree of his horse, and everything else he could think of to make himself agreeable.

  One of the riders took his reins and guided him onto the ground. He was told to remove his clothes, which he did without objection, trying to smile in his nakedness and hoping, through his talk, to sensibly dissuade them from their infamous finale.

  The speaker raised his hand—it was gloved, holding tongs—and said, “It seems to me your tongue is worth its weight in silver.”

  The man behind Pale forced him to his knees. They held his arms, opened his mouth, and extracted the prize with the tongs. The speaker made quick work with a knife before depositing Pale’s most worthy possession in a bag and galloping away, with the stolen horse and the other four riders, off the road and into the forest.

  Pale staggered on, trying to stop the bleeding with his hands and fainting, more than once, on the long walk to Root.

  The Maimers had first appeared last year and quickly grown to legendary status—mysterious men who appeared and disappeared, like figures in Nabby’s most supernatural tales, after stealing everything a person owned and then, worst of all, the most valuable part of his or her self. In a single summer, they had taken an old man’s majestic beard, a lady’s golden hair, a scholar’s eye, and a nursemaid’s nipples. They had crippled a farmer’s leg, slashed a dandy’s face, and broken a blacksmith’s elbows. Their attacks had finally ended with the onset of cold, and it had been hoped throughout the winter they would not begin again. But now a lawyer had lost his tongue, and even though Molly had emerged from the river with no apparent mutilation, Tom and Benjamin had spent the day wondering whether she, and not John Pale, had really been the Maimers’ first victim of the year.

  “Molly and I discussed Mr. Pale when I returned to the house at midday,” Benjamin said, considering his pipe more often than he smoked it. “She inquired about the blood on my shirt, which I had neglected to change before entering her room. I explained what had happened and it left her quite amazed—as amazed, I would say, as anyone had been upon learning of the Maimers.”

  “Could the Maimers,” Tom said, “be something else she forgot?”

  Benjamin shook his head. “As I said to you this morning, she appears more frightened than legitimately fogged. My true purpose in inviting you this morning was not to jog her thoughts but to test another theory. I observed her when you came and saw what I expected.”

  “What?”

  “Trust,” Benjamin said. “I believe she may confide in you. Perhaps in you alone.”

  Tom leaned back with a quizzical expression. He drew upon his pipe until it crackled; he exhaled. “Why me?”

  “You saved her life.”

  “So did you.”

  Benjamin sipped his smoak, taking time to think. “She was not in mortal danger once you pulled her from the river. I can scarcely claim credit for the speed of her recovery. The cold should have killed her, yet she bore it and survived, clinging unconscious to a branch, and had an appetite—a radiance!—by suppertime the very same day. Remarkable, remarkable…”

  Tom leaned back, studying the wishbones dangling overhead. There was one from every Lumen Night since before Tom’s family had acquired the tavern, and the oldest had furs of accumulated dust. Thirty-eight bones, every one of them intact. Nabby said the wishes remained within the marrow, that the bones protected anyone who boarded at the tavern.

  “Her locket,” Tom said.

  “Contains a tooth,” Benjamin answered. “I examined it while she slept. It is a partial tooth: the fragment, I believe, of an incisor. The reverse of the locket bears the maker’s mark—twenty-two-karat gold, made in Umber—which makes her either a wealthy girl from here in Floria”—Benjamin puffed his pipe—“or a wealthy girl from Bruntland.”

  Three thousand miles overseas, Tom thought. A child of the mother country, floating here alone without a memory of anything but drifting into Root. Wealthy or a thief. Either way, far from home, be it Grayport or Liberty or weeks across the ocean.

  “I have saved the most dramatic fact for last,” Benjamin told him. “When I stooped to unclasp the locket, I had greater leave to examine her breasts.”

  Tom raised his eyebrows. Benjamin frowned, embarrassed and irked, from a strictly profe
ssional standpoint, by the misinterpretation.

  “Molly gave birth,” Benjamin said. “I would guess within a fortnight.”

  Tom bit down and cracked the end of his pipe stem. He lowered it and said, “You don’t think the Maimers took…”

  Despite the amber light pulsing from the hearth, Benjamin visibly paled as he considered, lost for words, a possibility that neither of them wanted to admit.

  Chapter Four

  CITY OF UMBER IN BRUNTLAND, CONTINENT OF HERALDIA SEVENTEEN YEARS EARLIER

  Lord Bell stormed the birthing room, having listened to the cries as long as he could tolerate and now, after battering the door into the wall, feeling staggered by the sight of so much blood. The gunmetal smell of it, the sheen upon the bed. How it glistened in the oil-light, appearing to have carried out a thick, violet clot—a baby, wet and wriggling in the governess’s hands. The muggy air that damped his waistcoat and weighed down his lungs seemed a visceral extension of his young wife’s blood.

  The governess, Frances, almost slipped when she turned. She was slender as a heron, though without a heron’s grace, and said, “M’lord!” at the violence of his unexpected entrance.

  The room was broad and richly furnished with the four-poster bed against the pheasant-papered wall. Lord Bell strode across the floor, gazing at his wife between her wide-spread knees as she lay upon her back, staring up toward the ceiling. Frances stepped in front of him and held out the child, showing how its neck was strangled by the cord. Bell drew his penknife and cut it with a scowl, careful not to slit the miniature throat, and only then did Frances sob, overcome in her relief, quivering and fumbling with the newborn’s limbs.

  “Go,” Bell said.

  Frances hurried to a softly lit corner of the room where a table stood with swaddling cloths, a pitcher, and a bowl.