The Builders

by Polansky, Daniel

  Chapter 5: Boudica’s Arrival

  When the Captain returned from the back Boudica was at the table, the brim of her sombrero covering most of her face. Leaning against the wall behind her was a rifle nearly as long as its owner, a black walnut stock with an intricately engraved barrel. She was smiling quietly at some jest of Bonsoir’s as if she had been there all day—indeed, as if they had never parted.

  He thought about saying something but decided against it.

  Chapter 6: The Dragon’s Lair

  The Captain had been journeying for the better part of three days when he crested the woodland path into the clearing. He was in the north country, where there was still water, and trees, and green growing things—but even so it was a dry day, and the heat of the late afternoon held its grip against the coming of the evening. He was tired, and thirsty, and angry. Only the first two were remediable, or the results of his long walk. The inn was a squat, stone, two-story structure with a thatched roof and a low wall surrounding it. Above the entrance was a whittled sign that read evergreen rest. Inside, a thin innkeeper waited to greet him, and a fat wife cooked stew, and a homely daughter set the tables.

  The Captain did not go inside. The Captain swung around to the small garden that lay behind the building.

  In recent years these sorts of hostelries had become less and less common, with bandits and petty marauders plaguing the roads, choking traffic, and making travel impossible for anyone unable to afford an armed escort. Even the lodges themselves had become targets, and those that remained had begun to resemble small forts, with high walls, and stout doors, and proprietors that greeted potential customers with cocked scatterguns.

  The reason the Evergreen Rest had undergone no such revisions—the reason no desperado within five leagues was foolish enough to buy a glass of beer there, let alone make trouble—stood behind an old tree stump, an ax poised above his head. Age had withered his skin from a bright crimson to a deep maroon, but it had done nothing to excise the flecks of gold speckled through his flesh. Apart from the shift in hue, the years showed little on the salamander. He balanced comfortably on webbed feet, sleek muscle undiluted with blubber. His faded trousers were worn but neatly cared for. He had sweated through his white shirt and loosened his shoestring necktie to ease the passage of his breath.

  He paused at the Captain’s approach but went back to his work after a moment, splitting logs into kindling with sure, sharp motions. The Captain watched him dismember a choice selection of timber before speaking. “Hello, Cinnabar.”

  Cinnabar had calm eyes, friendly eyes, eyes that smiled and called you “sir” or “madam,” depending on the case, eyes like cool water on a hot day. Cinnabar had hands that made corpses, lots of corpses, walls and stacks of them. Cinnabar’s eyes never seemed to feel anything about what his hands did.

  “Hello, Captain,” Cinnabar’s mouth said. Cinnabar’s arms went back to chopping wood.

  “It’s been a while,” the Captain added, as if he had just realized it.

  “Time does that.”

  “Time does,” the Captain agreed. “You surprised to see me?”

  Cinnabar took another log from the pile, set it onto the tree stump. “Not really,” he said, the denial punctuated by the fall of his ax.

  The Captain nodded. It was not going well, he recognized, but he wasn’t quite sure why or how to change it. He took his hat off and fanned himself for a moment before continuing. “You a cook?” While waiting for the answer he reached down and picked up a small rock.

  “Busboy.”

  “It’s been a long walk. Think I could get some water?”

  Cinnabar stared at the Captain for a moment, as if searching for some deeper meaning. Then he nodded and started toward a rain barrel near the back entrance. As he did so the Captain, with a sudden display of speed, pitched the stone he had been holding at the back of his old companion’s head.

  For a stuttered second it sailed silently toward Cinnabar’s skull. Then it was neatly cradled in the salamander’s palm. But the motion that ought to have linked these two events—the causal bridge between them—was entirely absent, like frames cut from a film.

  “That was childish,” Cinnabar said, dropping the stone.

  “I needed to see if you still had it.”

  Cinnabar stared at the Captain with his eyes that looked kind but were not.

  “You know why I’m here?”

  “Are you still so angry?”

  The Captain drew himself up to his full height. It wasn’t much of a height, but that was how high the Captain drew himself. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Hell yeah.”

  Cinnabar turned his face back to the unchopped pile of wood. He didn’t say anything.

  Gradually the Captain deflated, his rage spent. “So you’ll come?”

  Cinnabar blinked once, slowly. “Yes.”

  The Captain nodded. The sound of someone laughing drifted out from the inn. The crickets took to chirruping. The two old friends stood silently in the fading light, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at them. That they were old friends, I mean. Anyone could see it was getting dark.

  Chapter 7: Cinnabar’s Arrival

  Cinnabar walked into the bar looking much the same as when the Captain had left him. A faded shirt, a black bolo tie threaded through it. But now he was weighted down with iron, as if afraid the southern wind might carry him away. Two oversized revolvers peeked out over his belt. The butt of a smaller cousin hung from his shoulder, a bulge in his boot rounding out the family reunion. Turning to hang his coat on the wall he revealed one final engine of destruction, a rifle with the barrel cut down. It was strapped sideways across his lower back, just above the root of his tail.

  “Do you think you brought enough metal?” Bonsoir asked, whiskers twitching at the joke.

  “For what we’re planning?”

  Bonsoir considered this for a moment before replying without any trace of his former good humor. “We should try to find you a shotgun.”

  Cinnabar nodded and took his seat.

  Chapter 8: A Well-Earned Retirement

  Barley was surprised to see a customer so late in the day. Since taking over the general store he had grown as familiar with the flow of commerce in his small town as a fisherman does with the current. It was a Sunday, and that meant a deluge of sales after church let out—penny candy and ribbons for the children, cask ale and bits of finery for their parents—but little enough thereafter. In fact he had planned to close early and head across the street to the town’s only other establishment, a modest hostelry, drink a glass of cool beer and eat a steak dinner. He was glad now that he hadn’t. Between the sun’s glare and the weak eyes common to his species, he couldn’t make out which of his regulars was standing in his doorway, but he waved him in anyway. He was a friendly sort, Barley. At least he had lately become so.

  “Don’t worry, we’re open.” His wide grin of greeting fell away as the Captain brushed through the entrance.

  “Hello, Barley,” the Captain said, extending his hand.

  After a short but noticeable pause, Barley reached across the trestle and took it. “Captain.” Barley was an adult badger, slate gray and nearly big enough to touch the ceiling. His palm was the size of the mouse’s chest, and it swallowed up its counterpart as if hungry for more.

  “It wasn’t easy to find you.”

  “I didn’t want to be found.”

  The Captain nodded and scanned the badger’s establishment. It was spare but well maintained, rows of stock neatly arranged, the ground freshly swept. It was, in short, indistinguishable from a hundred other general stores the Captain had passed through in his lifetime. He tried to square it with his memories of the creature who managed it. It was hard going. “It’s a nice place you’ve got.”

  Barley inspected the mouse’s face for any hint of mockery. “Thanks. I took over a few years ago. The owner’s daughter went east for work, and he didn’t have anyone to leave it to.”

&nb
sp; “You like it?”

  Barley smiled, almost self-consciously. “I do. It’s . . . quiet. Since the mine dried up there’s not much traffic. I know the customers; I know what they want. They come in smiling and they leave the same way.”

  The Captain nodded, not really listening. “I’m putting the old crew together.”

  “I’m out,” Barley said. For years Barley had dreaded this moment, hoped it would never come, feared that when it did his courage would shrivel up and he wouldn’t be able to cough out those words. The moment of truth had revealed itself as not being nearly so terrible as he had supposed. He decided to say it again. “I’m out. You’ve been good to me, Captain, but I’ve been good to you too. The way I figure it, we’re even.”

  The Captain kept the off-white of his dead eye firm on the badger, but his face didn’t twitch. “I need you, Barley. There’s no one can do what you can do.”

  “What I do?” Barley smiled and nodded to his stock on the shelves behind him. “I sell things, Captain. Notepaper and spools of thread, frying pans and hardtack. You need any of those, I can give it to you at cost. But beyond that . . .” His lips drew into a frown and he shook his head slowly. “I don’t kill anymore. I won’t kill anymore. I’m through with it.”

  “We’ve all killed, Barley.”

  “Not like I have. Not so many, not near so many. None of you did, not even Cinnabar . . .” For a moment Barley’s long snout hung open, and he lost himself in ugly memory. Then he blinked twice and turned back toward his chief. “I’m not arguing with you, Captain. I’m telling you how it is. I won’t do it anymore. Everyone has the right to change.”

  The Captain nodded, unsurprised, but with a certain weary sadness. “I figured you’d say as much. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too . . .” Barley began, but before he could finish the Captain put furred fingers to his lips and let out a sharp whistle. The pair of sewer rats who entered then were as hard as pig iron, scarred things from one of the cities back east. The Captain had brought them special for the job. To judge by their kit and manner, it was not the first time they’d come to a foreign place for the purpose of doing evil.

  Barley took a slow glance at the two of them, then turned his gaze back onto their employer. Having summoned his minions, the Captain now showed them a distinct lack of interest, his attention focused entirely on the badger.

  The two rats were professionals, the first covering Barley with his rifle while the second fanned out to flank him, his hand on a big revolver dangling from his waist.

  “This him?” the one with the rifle asked.

  The Captain nodded.

  The rat turned back to Barley. “Sorry, pal. Nothing personal.”

  “Just business,” Barley agreed, his coal black eyes pinning down on the Captain.

  The first rat nodded and leveled the rifle at Barley’s skull; he was experienced enough to know one in the body wasn’t a kill shot for a badger, not even at close range. He cocked the lever back. His partner stood by silently.

  Badgers are not spry animals, and Barley was no outlier. But he understood the importance of committing to violence, of giving oneself over fully to savagery and not playing the flirt. And perhaps his placidity had lulled the rats into a false sense of security. Though well practiced in murder, they had misread his resignation—it was not acceptance of his own death that Barley’s stillness signaled. It was acceptance of theirs.

  Barley dropped suddenly to all fours, shielded briefly by the thick wood of the counter. There was a loud crack as a rifle bullet tore through the space the badger had just occupied. Then heavy splinters flew off in all directions, Barley pitching himself through the oak paneling and into his would-be assassin. The full weight of his shoulder impacted against the rat and bounced him against the side wall. A second crack, lower and softer than the retort of the rifle, signaled the shattering of the rodent’s vertebrae.

  The other rat managed to get a shot off, but his nerve was broken and he didn’t take time to aim; the bullet tore a fat gouge from Barley’s cheek but nothing more. He roared furiously and switched directions on a dime, his massive bulk flailing but his steps as graceful as a dancer’s. The rat quivered his lower lip and squirted down his pant leg, and then Barley brought his hands together in a clap that shook the very foundations of the building.

  Barley turned back to the Captain, mad with rage, his palms red with the outline of the slaughtered rat. He watched his old commander for a moment, the layers of tightly corded muscle and the fur surrounding it insufficient to contain his wild anger. Then he sprinted forward and scooped up the unresisting mouse with one hand, lifting him above the ground and giving him a shake that would have snapped the spine of a less hardy victim.

  “Five years!” The Captain’s whiskers were pinned back by the force of the roar. “Five years without murder, five years without a corpse! What have you done? What have you done?”

  The Captain’s face betrayed no knowledge that he was a few pounds per inch from oblivion, cool and steady and faintly mocking. “I made you a killer again.”

  Barley’s eyes, as big as the Captain’s head, bulged in their sockets. Barley’s lip quivered in the sort of spasm of rage that often precedes murder.

  But then Barley opened his grip, and the Captain fell awkwardly to the ground. He lay there for a half-moment, then pulled himself to his feet.

  Barley face was sad and heavy. He stared at the wall as though he was having trouble recognizing it.

  “St. Martin’s Day,” the Captain said. “The Partisan’s bar. Bring the machine.”

  After a long moment Barley nodded absently, and the Captain left, stepping casually over the broken body of the creature he had paid to die.

  Chapter 9: Barley’s Arrival

  Given that he stretched perhaps triple the combined size of the creatures waiting for him, Barley managed to enter the bar without drawing undue attention to himself. It wasn’t stealth, exactly; he was much too large for that. More a sort of unassuming quality that allowed eyes to pass over him without demanding the notice his dimensions rightfully demanded. In one hand he gripped the top handle of a black trunk, wide and presumably quite heavy, though you’d not have known it by the ease with which it was carried. Apart from whatever was inside, Barley had come unarmed.

  The conversation at the back table had long since gone silent. The Captain was not one for small talk, even in his cups, and Boudica and Cinnabar’s studied muteness made the mouse seem positively loquacious by comparison. Generally speaking, Bonsoir didn’t see the silence of others as a barrier to conversation, but even the most committed orator requires some assistance from the chorus. Without it he had turned, like his companions, to the rewarding but largely silent task of getting drunk.

  So Bonsoir looked up happily when the creaking floorboards indicated the arrival of another member of their merry band, and his smile widened as he discovered the newcomer’s identity. Barley matched it with a grin that overran his snout and spilled over into a booming laugh. Unlikely as it seemed, the ink-black stoat and the broad-chested badger had been thick as thieves during their service, to use an overly sympathetic euphemism to describe years spent in the business of violence and mayhem.

  “That’s an ugly hat,” Barley started.

  Bonsoir’s eyes went wide with mock fury. “This is the greatest hat anyone has ever worn,” he said, pointing at his beret. “This hat was a a gift from the Emperor of Mexico, after I saved his life from a rampaging skunk. He begged me to stay on as his chief adviser, but I said, ‘Emperor, Bonsoir cannot be caged, not even with bars of gold.’”

  “Mexico doesn’t have an emperor.”

  “That is Mexico’s misfortune, for all of the greatest countries have emperors.”

  Barley laughed a second time and made his way to the oversized stool that Reconquista had put out to accommodate his ample backside. He set his case next to his chair and called for more liquor. From behind the counter the rat brought anot
her jug to join its siblings scattered about the table.

  If, as Barley had insisted, he had turned over a new leaf, and was no longer willing to countenance murder—he seemed altogether comfortable in the presence of creatures who had made it their calling.

  Chapter 10: Our Old Friend, the Devil

  The Captain slunk through the back streets of the Capital like waste through a drainage pipe. There were few enough now who could remember him, and the likelihood that any of them were spending this stormy evening in the slums north of the docks was slim—but the Captain was careful even when he didn’t think he needed to be.

  So he stuck to the shadows, and cut through alleys, and kept his hand firm on his revolver. The Captain did not like being in the Capital, had not been back since that grim final night five years past. But he had one more visit to make, one last strand to pull together, and it was not coincidence that he had saved it for last. The rain trickled down from the top of his hat to the brim, dripped over his dead eye and into his whiskers. It was the kind of storm that made walking feel like wading, the kind of rain that wet the ground without cooling the air. It was the right kind of weather for the business ahead. The Captain stifled a sniffle.

  He took a turn down an unremarkable side street and stopped in front of a battered wooden house. No sign established it as a place of trade, and there was nothing to indicate it was anything but what it seemed; except the door was heavy, and thick, heavier and thicker than a door needed to be for a shack in a slum. The Captain banged on it, three solid blows.

  A peephole slid open. A beady pair of eyes peeked out from it. “What you want?” a voice asked. It was not a friendly voice. Voices coming through peepholes rarely are.

  “I’m here to see the Underground Man.”