by Frank Tuttle
“That is a problem. But happily, I have a coach. My driver is discrete. If you have a dark coat, you could come along, and I assure you no one would be the wiser.”
“What about your oath?”
He shrugged. “The House, as I said, values initiative. If I’m asked if I was followed, I can honestly say I was not. And if they ask if I invited you to ride along with me, well, I should have to confess, but I doubt that I’ll be asked that particular question.”
I lifted an eyebrow.
“Miss Hoobin has, at best, four days. My efforts to locate her have proved fruitless, as have yours. You lack the time to learn what I have learned. I lack your ability to move about unnoticed, and move about in the daylight. I give you my word you will not be harmed. I give you my word you will be returned here safely well before sunrise.”
He took off his glasses, looked me eye-to-eye. “I am halfdead, Mr. Markhat. That may well deny me a place among the saints, but does it truly guarantee me a throne beside the devil?”
I looked him in the eye. No saint ever had such a face, or such a stare.
“I’ll get my coat. And call me Markhat. Mister is for old folks.”
Evis smiled a pointy smile behind his hand. “Call me Evis. Shall we go?”
We went, the devil and I, out into the night.
Curfew, quoth the Regent, is Rannit’s greatest achievement since the War.
That statement is usually followed by a lot of prattle about peaceful co-existence with our halfdead brethren and statistics twisted to prove that the only groups preyed upon by said brethren are burglars and street gangs. Honest folk, we are assured, folk tired from a day’s honest work, folk at home and in their beds, these folk have nothing to fear from the halfdead.
I sat alone across from Evis. Beside him, on either side, sat two more halfdead, both taller and wider than he. They too wore gloves, and black, high-collared shirts that nearly covered their skin. They smelled of strong fire-flower cologne and new leather boots. Their hats were worn low, their faces were turned down and their chests never rose, never fell.
The driver, surprisingly, was human, as was the man seated beside him. Occasionally they’d exchange a muffled laugh or curse as the carriage lurched over a pothole. Hearing their voices was comforting to me, the sole human passenger in a carriage full of halfdead.
I watched the dark streets roll by through the glass over Evis’s shoulder. Streetlamps guttered and sparked. There was still light in a few windows, and more than once I saw it extinguished as we passed.
We left Cambrit, followed Stewart to the crossing of the Edge Street sewer canal, then veered off down an alley and turned south.
Evis peeped over my shoulder, watched the streets roll by through the window at my back. He’d put his glasses away, and his dead eyes shone now and then in the passing light of streetlamps.
“Do you miss it?” he asked, looking out at the dark. “You cannot appreciate it, under the Curfew.”
The carriage rolled on. I caught sight of a drunk, who saw the halfdead carriage, worked out who it bore and dived clumsily into the sewer canal.
“Miss what? The night?”
Evis nodded.
“It looks so different now. So…bright. There are shadows, to be sure, but light too. Silver light.” He shrugged. “I merely wondered if you ever missed just walking down a street, beneath a half-full moon.”
The turgid water closed over the drunk. If he ever surfaced, I never saw it.
“Oh, not much.” I felt it best not to advertise my recent spate of Curfew-breaking, lest his silent friends prick up their ears. “How about the sun? You ever miss that?”
A streetlamp splashed faint light into the carriage, and I looked away from those eyes before I could stop myself.
“Hardly at all.”
The driver pulled back his reins and spoke, and the carriage slowed, pulled to a halt.
“First stop,” said Evis. His companions stirred, exiting the carriage with all the sound and fuss of a dropped silk handkerchief. “Wait here with the driver, won’t you? My friends and I will see that the site is safe. We’ll call for you, when that is established.”
I shrugged. “Sure. Bon appetite.”
He smiled, moved and was gone.
I slid over, peeped out the window. The halfdead were gone. Evis had left the carriage door open, so I climbed slowly out.
We were parked at the corner of Gentry and Low. The stench of the canal, a block behind us, rode the night, thick and choking. Weathered brick buildings, two and three stories tall, formed a canyon that blotted out most of the sky.
Rannit is packed with once thriving commercial districts that, for one reason or another, fell into decay. The streets zigzagging off Gentry are some of the oldest. What were once breweries and foundries are now warehouses, hulks and shells, home to rodents and pigeons and failing businesses making a doomed last stand against oblivion. No lights shone in the broken windows, no smoke rose from chimneys, no shapes moved behind the doors. Before the Truce and the Curfew, you’d also have found squatters lounging in the alleys and making their beds in the empty stoops. Now, though, the buildings are empty and still.
“Cheerful, ain’t it?” asked the driver, in a whisper, from his perch atop the carriage.
He held a glossy black crossbow, as did his grinning human companion. Crossbows are illegal inside the city limits. I eschewed to point this out.
“Rent’s cheap, though,” I whispered back.
“Shut up,” hissed the driver’s friend. “Boss said keep it quiet.”
“You boys know what the Boss is up to?” I asked.
They both chuckled. “Yeah, right,” said the driver’s friend, so faint I could barely hear. “We’re in on all the House policy meetings.”
I shrugged, expecting as much.
“They ain’t so bad,” said the driver. “Best job I ever had.”
They fell silent, after that. After a few moments, the driver’s friend jerked and started, fumbled in his jacket pocket, pulled out something that looked like a pocket watch, fiddled with it briefly.
“The boss says you can go and have a look,” said the driver, to me. “That way. You’ll be met.” He hooked a thumb in the direction the halfdead had vanished.
I sauntered off as if it were noon, and I was going for lunch at Eddie’s.
I’d gone maybe twenty feet when one of Evis’s halfdead companions glided out of the shadows and fell into step with me. “This way,” he said, in a voice that sent literal shivers down my spine. “It is not far.”
I followed his lead. His face was cloaked in shadow, and I was heartily glad of it.
Faint light flared ahead, outlining a door and the gaps between the planks of a boarded-up window. “There,” said my pale guide, halting. “I shall keep watch here.”
I thanked him and went.
The door was open. Someone had simply grasped the knob and pushed until door and frame tore free from the wall. I stepped past it, into a small room lit by a guttering candle standing in the middle of the floor.
The room stank of rot and rat. I shut my mouth and looked around-bare cracked plaster walls, a single window and the wood floor curling and warped and stained from the leaks that had ravaged the ceiling.
A single door was set in the far side. It, too, had been forced open, struck with such force that most of the doorframe was hanging splintered beside the wall.
Evis stepped through the opening. “There is more. We are too late-but there is more to see.”
He donned his dark glasses, nodded at the candle, turned and vanished back through the broken door.
I picked up the candle and followed.
The door wound down a long dark hall. Walls, floors and ceiling all bore water damage, but the warped pine wood floor had been repaired in two places. Recently, too, the nail-heads shone of new-beaten iron in the light, which meant they hadn’t had time to rust.
The hall abruptly ended. I stepped down, n
early stumbled, onto a cobble-brick floor, and my candlelight lost sight of any ceiling, and all the walls. It did illuminate the backs of four black-clad halfdead, who stood in a small circle a dozen steps away.
Evis and his dark glasses turned to face me.
“They are friends. They do not see you.”
“Wonderful.” My mouth was so dry I spoke in a ragged whisper. My new friends didn’t turn, didn’t leap, so I licked my lips and took a step toward them. “What is it we’re seeing?”
I wasn’t seeing a thing, aside from vampires and a flickering ring of shadows and floor-bricks.
“Blood was spilled here. Spilled in such quantity that it rushed onto the floor.” He indicated the area, which the halfdead surrounded. They pulled back a few steps, and Evis motioned me forward. I took my guttering candle and went.
All I saw were bricks, just like all the others-black and smooth and rounded over with age and wear. Half the old buildings in Rannit were built over even older roads, just like this one. The builders merely scraped the dirt off the cobbles and called it a floor.
I knelt down, put my nose near the cold baked clay. If there was any blood there, it was too old and too faint for human eyes and a stub of a candle to see.
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, rising.
“Do,” said Evis. “You see no trace because soon after the blood was spilled, the floor was cleaned. I suspect they used a mop and tanner’s bleach. My associates and I can still smell the traces though. Some must have run between the cobbles.”
“Rannit’s got more blood-stains than pot holes,” I said. “What makes this one special? What does it have to do with Martha Hoobin?”
Evis sighed.
Then he frowned.
“Mavis. Torno, Glee, come here.”
Three new vampires appeared and glided near, their ghost-white faces turned down, their dirty marble eyes turned away from my light.
“What the-”
Evis raised a hand and the halfdead stopped still, faces down, beside me. I shut up.
A moment passed. I strained my ears, since my eyes were proving useless. I heard nothing at first-then, faintly, I made out scratching, like a mouse in a wall, chewing away. I held my breath but couldn’t locate the source.
Evis put his dark glasses away. “Dear God,” he said, in a whisper. “Dear God.”
A fourth vampire appeared at my right elbow. Evis nodded at it.
“Go now, Mr. Markhat. Sara will take you to safety.”
I opened my mouth. The scratching grew louder. Was it coming from the floor?
“Sara!”
Sara reached out, put both cold hands on my waist and hefted me a foot off the floor.
She’d taken a single gliding step toward the door when the brick floor at our feet exploded and a long bubbling scream broke the silence.
A scream and a smell. A stench, really, louder in its way than any noise-rotting flesh, warm and wet, thrust suddenly up out of the earth.
A brick struck Sara in the side of her head, and she faltered, tripped and went down, and me with her.
I heard Evis shout something and felt whips of motion around me and in that instant before my dropped candle flicked out I caught sight of the thing that we’d raised. It leaped toward me, a thing of loose and rotted flesh, slapping Evis casually aside when he grasped its right arm. There was no face upon that head, which was itself only a dark, swollen mass that sent sprays of thick black fluid flying with every movement. It had no eyes, no ears, no lower jaw-but it saw me, somehow, and it raced toward me, arms outstretched, ruined belly burst open and trailing shriveled entrails as it came.
The candle went dark. I scrambled up, and I ran. Behind me, I heard a thud and a gurgle as Sara rose and grappled with the dead thing. Evis shouted again and a pair of crossbows threw, thunk-whee, thunk-whee.
I charged across the cobbles. I couldn’t see the door. I couldn’t see the wall. I couldn’t see the thing behind me, but I could hear it, hear Evis and his halfdead as they grappled, leaped and struck.
The ruined thing screamed again, so close I smelled its foul exhalation, felt cold spittle on my back.
I slammed face-first into a wall that might have needed new plaster and new paint but hadn’t suffered much loss in the way of structural integrity. The room spun. Blood spewed out of my nose.
It shrieked at the scent, maybe a dozen steps behind. I put the wall on my left and charged, arms groping for a door, any door.
More crossbows threw. A bolt buried itself in the wall a hand’s breadth from my head. I ducked and kept moving-had I turned the wrong way? Was the door behind me now?
Something hissed. Something cold and wet laid itself on the back of my neck. I bellowed for Evis, lashed out with a back kick that sank into something soft. The smell hit me anew. I whirled and kicked again and it screamed, wet and triumphant, nearly in my bloodied face.
I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see at all, but I felt the air rush past me, heard the pair of grunts and thuds as a pair of vampires dived into the creature and pinned it to the wall. A thick, foul spray of fluid caught me square in the face when the halfdead hit, and I retched and stumbled away, pawing and spitting.
A cold hand gripped my shoulder. “This way,” said Evis, shoving me forward. “Go. Find the carriage. Tell Bertram and Floyd to wait with you.”
Behind me, I heard shrieks and blows-short wet shrieks punctuated with fast, hard blows. I assumed they had the dead thing pinned and when Evis let go, I moved.
I wasn’t followed. The gurgling shrieks behind me grew fainter and shorter. I heard the faint sound of steel slicing the air and, suddenly, all was silent.
I found the ruined door, cut my hand on the splintered doorframe, darted through it and was down the hall at a run. My footfalls were loud in the dark, and all the way out to the street my mind played tricks on me, hearing the sounds of pursuit behind me, hearing a faint growl that crept from a bloated, gurgling throat.
But I made it. I stumbled whole into the street, mopped blood from my nose, tried to pick out my rights and my lefts from the shadows and the warehouse fronts. That way, I decided. Right. Right for Evis’s carriage. Left to just skirt the whole mess and head for the country and raise a crop of sheep or do whatever it is they do out there.
I’d taken a single step that way when hands-gentle hands-fell on my shoulder. “That way,” said a voice, and I was turned around, and a clean white linen handkerchief was placed in my hand. “The carriage awaits.”
I mopped blood and blinked.
The street was full of halfdead.
Ten or more glided past, quiet as ghosts. My giver of handkerchiefs joined them, gliding toward the warehouse like a black-clad puff of wind.
I shuddered, but I held the cloth tight to my nose and marched toward the carriage. More halfdead popped out of the shadows. Each and all ignored me, though I tottered and stank and dripped their favorite beverage liberally out onto the street.
There’s a metaphor there, somewhere. Something about bleeding profusely at a vampire parade. One day I’ll finish it and tell Mama it’s a Troll saying. But that night I just clamped the cloth to my nose and headed for Evis’s carriage.
I found it easily enough, though the coachmen had lit their lanterns. They were both on the street, and both bore crossbows and nervous frowns.
They backed up and wrinkled their noses at my approach.
“We’ll never get the smell out,” said one to the other.
“Just be glad you aren’t wearing it,” I said. The driver, bless him, produced a clean handkerchief and stepped close enough to hand it to me.
“The boss said you found a bad one,” he said, quietly.
I mopped and nodded, not asking how the Boss had communicated this to the driver. I figured House Avalante could afford the finest sorcerous long-talkers.
The driver’s friend opened the door. “Best get in. We’ll be leaving soon, and in a hurry.” He squinted at me in the lantern
light. “It didn’t scratch you, did it?”
Hell. Had it?
I shook off my old Army jacket, kicked it into the gutter when I saw the thick black stain all down the back. I rolled up my sleeves, checked my arms and waist and legs.
All the fresh blood was from my nose or my right hand. All the other-well, it wasn’t mine.
“No,” I said. My voice shook, and I was getting weak at the knees, so I climbed into Evis’s fine carriage, leaving black stains as I went.
Bertram and Floyd-I never learned which was which-watched me go, then turned their frowns and their crossbows back out toward the night.
I sat and I panted and even with the door and window open I gagged at my smell. My heart still rushed, and memories of the thing’s bloated, eyeless face, I knew, would haunt my dreams for years.
“The boss said you found a bad one.”
That’s what the driver had said. A bad one. The flip side of Evis and his well-groomed friends. Halfdead in the raw-a hungry corpse, rotted and foul, still driven to a grim parody of life by a hunger that drove it from the grave.
I shuddered, couldn’t stop, did what I’d done when that happened during the war-shut my eyes, clasped my hands and counted my breaths. One, two, three, four. Over and over, until it was past.
I’d only gotten through it twice when I heard the driver mutter a curse and the carriage rocked as his friend scrambled up onto his seat. The ponies shuffled their hooves when he caught up the reins.
Evis and a pair of halfdead were just entering the yellow ring of lantern light. Evis’s clothes were torn and stained and ragged. His hat was gone, and his jacket hung in tatters. His pale skin, like that of his companions, was stained and spotted with the dark black blood of the thing from under the floor.
Evis and another halfdead supported a third between them. I squinted, recognized the limp, injured vampire as Sara, the one who’d tried to take me outside.
It was only in that light, with her jacket gone, that I realized Sara had once been a woman. She’d been halfdead so long it was hard to tell, since they all wear their hair short, and she’d perhaps been tall and thin before she changed. Now her head lolled, and her arms twitched spasmodically, and though she moved her feet she did little more than shuffle them across the cobbles while Evis and the other halfdead hauled her toward the carriage. Evis and his upright companion looked grim. Sara, too, was slathered in old black blood-but a wound in her chest, right over her heart, oozed and glistened with blood of her own.
