The Builders

by Polansky, Daniel

  “Yes.”

  “I was.”

  “That surprises me.”

  “No one is as smart as they think I am. No one is as anything as they think anyone is.”

  “No, I suppose they aren’t.”

  “Except you. You’re exactly as fast as they say.”

  A match sparked. Two dots of light bobbed in the dark. “Why did they do it?” Cinnabar asked.

  “Why do you think they did it?”

  “I’m not as smart as you.”

  “Still.”

  “The usual reasons,” Cinnabar suggested. “Greed, lust, revenge, power, boredom. The Captain is unlovable.”

  The one light was all by its lonesome. “Yes.”

  “If they’d bothered to ask me—”

  “Let’s not go down that road.”

  “No. I was surprised at the Quaker, though. If ever two things loved each other . . .”

  “What is love against instinct? We’re all animals, after all. How long can a thing go against its nature?”

  It was completely dark. “And what is our nature?”

  But the question was too obvious to need an answer.

  Chapter 31: An Expected Reversal

  Mephetic did not get angry when word came that Zapata had failed. He had figured Zapata would fail. The armadillo was loud, and the armadillo was hard, and the armadillo was even mean, so far as that went. But the armadillo was no match for the Captain. Still, it had been worth a try. Even the toughest bastard can catch a bullet in the back of the spine.

  He had tripped up the last time, hadn’t he? Five years they’d gone back and forth, tearing apart the kingdom during the War of Two Brothers. An inaccurate name, one he wouldn’t have chosen. The Toads, Elder and Younger, had taken no part in the conflict—hell, Mephetic’s pawn had been trashed on opium so much of the time he couldn’t tell his head from his trunk. Really it had always been between him and the Captain, half a decade of red hands and black deeds. And the Captain would have come out the better of it, if Mephetic hadn’t managed to turn half his company and even one in his inner circle. Many were the Captain’s virtues—if being a bloodthirsty, iron-hearted, grim-eyed bastard can be considered laudatory—but he wasn’t an easy animal to work for, and there had been plenty happy to do him wrong, especially with the promise of gold waiting at the end of their betrayal. In the event, the Captain had ended up killing most of them, so Mephetic hadn’t even had to pay.

  Not that Mephetic doubted his own forces would be any slower to knife his back, should the circumstances call for it, or even allow. They were deep in the heart of the inner keep, and Puss and Brontë were playing a game of pinochle. It seemed as though Puss was winning, though both participants were cheating so egregiously it was hard to say for certain.

  Mephetic took the missive he’d been reading and tossed it into the fire.

  “I take it they escaped your little trap?” Puss asked. Puss rarely missed the chance to revel in the misfortune of another, though the Captain’s survival little benefited him either.

  “This one.”

  “They must be awful tough”—Puss paused a moment to lick down a piece of fur—“if they managed to put the armadillo in the ground.”

  “I doubt they bothered to bury him.”

  “What about this Dragon?” Brontë asked, slipping a card surreptitiously, or what she imagined to be surreptitiously, from the fold of her dress. “Is he as fast as they say?”

  “He’s fast.”

  “How fast?”

  “Slower than a bolt of lightning. Somewhat quicker than a hummingbird’s wing.”

  Puss laughed. Brontë realized she’d just been made fun of, thought about getting angry, then remembered who Mephetic was and laughed also. There were upsides to being the boss, Mephetic often thought. It had been worth it, all the blood he’d needed to spill to get here. Wasn’t his blood, anyway.

  “And my bird?” the Quaker interrupted, the words stretched across the thing’s forked tongue. “What about my bird? What about my sweet, lost bird?”

  Puss stopped laughing. Brontë had already stopped laughing, but she looked a bit less jovial all the same.

  “She’s there,” Mephetic said, making sure not to look away.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Our spy says so.”

  The Quaker tucked his head back into his coils, but didn’t say anything else. He seemed happy, to the degree that such a quality could be attributed to a rattlesnake.

  “Far be it for me to play spoiler”—though in fact there was nothing Puss enjoyed more—“but I can’t help but observe that, thus far, the Captain’s hardly playing according to plan.”

  “Zapata wasn’t my plan. I’ve got a man on the inside.”

  “The one who betrayed them the last time? If this . . . mouse”—the last word spat out with the sort of contempt one would expect from an ancestral predator—“is all you say, I’d be wary of relying on the same gag twice.”

  “It’s not the same gag. And it’s not the same traitor.”

  Part the Third

  Chapter 32: The Soul of a Shrew

  The conductor was the sort of shrew who took his job very seriously. He had joined the company as a pup, just after the last track was laid. He been first in line at the office in fact, hat in hand, hopeful, desperate even, for employment. Not as an engineer, of course, nor as one of the brutes shoveling coal. It was not the trains that interested him really; their whistles were too noisy and their smokestacks too dirty. Rather, it was something about the idea of the railroad itself—a steel web crisscrossing the territories, strangling the land, operating according to principles of mathematical purity unseen in any organic creature—that fired his imagination, that gave him a secret and delicious thrill. The conductor was the sort of creature whose wildest fantasies were filled with ledgers that balanced perfectly, and rows of clocks chiming in eternal unison.

  He had signed on as a ticket-taker, a private soldier in that small army of creatures whose function was to mark paper and look at the marks on paper and mark the paper again, and sometimes, if the marks were not right, to look up from the paper and squint their bespectacled eyes (spectacles were virtually a professional requirement) and say, “Sorry, sir, but it seems your luggage was sent to Poughkeepsie and not Kalamazoo. You will receive it within eight to seventy-five business days, a business day being defined as Tuesdays and alternate Thursdays.” This last was the part the shrew liked the most.

  He had fulfilled his duties faithfully, moving up the ranks from junior assistant ticket-taker to assistant ticket-taker to ticket-taker to conductor. He was never sick and never late for work. He never took time off for personal reasons, never visited an ill relative or attended a friend’s nuptials. Two years earlier, in reward for this diligent service, he had been assigned to the Antelope Limited. “A critical posting,” his supervisor had informed him, “a sign of our trust in your sagacity, your prudence, and, most importantly,” he had said, raising his eyes archly, “your discretion.”

  In the years since the conductor had wondered, occasionally, why there was a massive metal door dividing the front carriage from the rest of the train, and also who lived inside said carriage, and why their presence necessitated armed guards, and finally, whether those guards were meant to ensure the safety of this precious cargo or make sure that it never left. But the conductor didn’t wonder much. Wondering wasn’t his job, after all. Whatever was going on in the front carriage, it gave him the right, in his own mind at least, to be twice as carping and cantankerous as he might otherwise have been, to scan every rider with thorough, even exaggerated, scrutiny.

  Though even under normal circumstances he wouldn’t have allowed them on the train. Maybe the badger. Despite his size he seemed good-humored, with an open face and a generous smile. And the opossum, she looked harmless enough, lazy and slow as sweet molasses.

  But not the salamander. The conductor didn’t like cold-bloods as a rule, and th
ere was something about this burnt-red specimen that was particularly off-putting. No, not the salamander, and certainly not the mouse, with his nasty scar and his eye that stared at the conductor as if waiting to repay an injury.

  The conductor was making his rounds before the train left the station, checking on the functionaries beneath him, ensuring that they were just the right amount of peevish, unhelpful without being aggressive. When he entered the car and saw those two sitting together, the salamander and the mouse, he made a mental note to find something wrong with their papers, or their luggage—to detect or invent a reason why it was that they needed to miss this particular train. He would be very apologetic about it, of course; he would blame it on regulations and his own superiors, sympathize with them in their misfortune, but march them back onto the platform all the same.

  With this serious but secretly enjoyable task ahead of him, the conductor was waylaid by the sudden chirrup of a nearby mole. “Excuse me, sir. Excuse me!” The second time she yelled loudly, though the conductor had already been stopping. “Sir, I require your assistance, please!”

  The conductor bristled. The conductor did not like being interrupted in the course of his duties, and he did not like being yelled at. He didn’t like a lot of things, truth be told. Still, a customer was a customer, and the conductor was nothing if not professional. “Of course, ma’am,” he began, his voice exactly how you would expect. “How can I help you?”

  “Finally.” Behind her bifocals the mole’s eyes were huge and blind and stupid. “I asked the muskrat who was selling the tickets, and he said that he didn’t know but that you might know, and so that’s why I’m asking you. Do you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Where my bags are, obviously.”

  “I’m afraid, ma’am, that I don’t have any—”

  “Of course you haven’t, I wouldn’t expect you have, but surely you must know someone who has, mustn’t you? When one gets on a train in the Capital one expects to find one’s bags when one gets to Last Gulch, doesn’t one? Assuming one is getting off in Last Gulch, which was where I changed trains.”

  “Of course, but—”

  “You certainly can’t expect me to survive forever with just the dress I’m wearing, can you? What do you take me for? A church mouse?”

  “No, obviously not—”

  “Good. I’m glad to see we can agree to that much. So what exactly do you plan to do about it?”

  “About what?”

  “My bags not being on this train,” said the mole, as if one of them were an idiot.

  “If you would just excuse me for a moment, I promise to come help you just as soon as—”

  But then the whistle blew, and the great iron steed bucked forward, and the conductor knew he had lost. For all that he might have wished otherwise, he could not very well throw a passenger off a moving train just because he didn’t like the look of him. He turned his attention back to the shrill mole, and her problem about which he could do nothing.

  Chapter 33: Just Past Ciudad del Gato . . .

  The badger got up from where he was sitting and ambled forward, squeezing his bulk through the narrow rows of seats. The conductor saw him from a carriage away, and his stomach dropped out from under him, because there was absolutely no way a creature of such size could fit in the bathroom. He excused himself from explaining to another passenger—an elderly turtle, he thought she was elderly at least, it was hard to tell with turtles—why it wasn’t possible for her to use her unassigned ticket anytime today, or anytime tomorrow, or really, just any time at all, and he approached the badger, trying to come up with a polite way of informing him that he was going to have to hold his bladder for the better part of three hours.

  It was only then that he noticed the mouse, the one he hadn’t liked, walking in the long shadow cast by the badger, and behind him the salamander whom he had liked even less. The conductor—who was not a particularly clever sort of creature, but who wasn’t quite dumb as a carpenter’s nail—began to think that today might turn out to be one of those days where things failed to abide by their proper routine. The conductor hated those sorts of days.

  The conductor turned around and headed forward until he came to the first-class compartments. A chubby vole sat as guardian between the two sections, making sure the hoi polloi didn’t get any ideas above their station. His name was Harold, and the most important thing he had learned in his life, as far as he was concerned, was that it was entirely possible to sleep with one’s eyes open, or at least open enough to deceive passersby, if one was willing to put in a bit of practice. True, it wasn’t as good as a full-on nap, but any degree of slumber was better than waking. As far as Harold was concerned, the better part of existence lay in those little moments of oblivion that preceded the last.

  The conductor hustled past without realizing his protector was dim to the world; he even took some degree of comfort in the barrier he imagined he was putting between himself and the badger. Indeed, as soon as he reached the first-class compartment, with its slightly more comfortable seats and vaguely polished décor, he felt a concrete sense of relief. Nothing bad, after all, ever happened to the rich.

  Sad to say, his optimism was short-lived. Through the glass door separating the two carriages the conductor saw the badger continue forward, Harold forced awake by his heavy footfalls, coming up from his seat to say something. And then Harold was back in his seat and in a deeper slumber than he had theretofore been enjoying, courtesy of the badger’s backhand.

  At that moment the conductor did the bravest thing he had ever done in his life, which was to run screaming toward the front of the train. When he reached the guarded carriage he banged on the door until the peephole slid open. The conductor did not know the rat inside—the conductor had never before tried to enter the front carriage, had never even acknowledged its existence. That was against the rules, and the conductor, in case you had somehow missed the point by now, was the sort of creature who liked following them.

  “They’re coming!” he yelled.

  “Who?”

  The conductor moved aside swiftly, allowing the rat to get a view of the troupe of creatures following in his wake. The conductor himself did not bother to turn around, and to judge by the sudden doubling of the circumference of the rat’s eyes, it was just as well that he did not.

  The door flew open. The conductor bolted through. The door slammed shut.

  The conductor had hoped that inside would be a dozen soldiers in full battle gear, or maybe a couple of hedgehogs with heavy artillery. So fear followed closely upon the heels of disappointment when he discovered that the impregnable fortress attached to the front of his train was crewed by two rats who looked barely out of their litter, holding their rifles gingerly and giving off a very distinct smell of terror.

  “What do we do now?” one of them asked. The other rat, the rat who had been looking through the peephole and had seen the badger, didn’t say anything.

  Needless to say, this was not the reaction that the shrew had anticipated. But he surprised himself, as he had several times so far that day, with his sangfroid, with his mental fortitude, with his keen sense of battlefield tactics. “We keep the door shut,” he answered.

  The rats nodded in unison. The conductor could hear the rumbling of the badger and his companions from the other carriage and tensed himself for the inevitable blows—blows that did not come.

  Gathering up his nerve, the conductor opened the peephole and looked out. Behind the door he could see the opossum and the badger standing around, neither looking particularly agitated. “This is double-reinforced steel!” yelled the conductor, trying to cover his fear. “You’ll never break it down!”

  The Badger scratched at the thick fur of his head awhile before answering. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  “I am?”

  It was then that the conductor felt air blowing in through an open window, which gave him a brief moment of happiness, because it was
a hot day after all, and the wind cool, but this was followed quickly by a much more potent sense of despair.

  “Keep the door shut,” said a thickly accented voice from behind him. “That is a fine plan. That is the sort of plan a fellow ought to be proud to have come up with.”

  Chapter 34: The Loot

  Bonsoir opened the reinforced-steel door and the Captain came through an instant later, stepping over the corpses with unstudied disinterest. A partition had been erected two-thirds of the way down the compartment, and the mouse stopped at the entrance to it, nodding at Cinnabar behind him. The Dragon slid the gate sideways with his usual extraordinary celerity, and before it banged against the frame he had both revolvers out, ready for whatever was waiting for them.

  A moment passed. Cinnabar holstered his guns.

  Bonsoir came in behind him, rolling a cigarette. “This is an unfortunate surprise,” he said, slipping his tobacco pouch underneath his beret before lighting his smoke with a match struck off his boot.

  “I guess this changes things,” Cinnabar said.

  The Captain reached over and plucked the cigarette from Bonsoir’s mouth. He took a long, slow drag before responding. “No, it doesn’t,” he said. Then he handed the smoke to Cinnabar and nodded at Bonsoir. “Tell Barley to grab him. We’ve got a long hike back to town.” He turned and walked back down the carriageway.

  Cinnabar and Bonsoir exchanged a look. The stoat shrugged and went off to find Barley. The Captain had spoken, and the Captain’s was the final word.

  Chapter 35: A Question of Numbers

  Mephetic had spent a long time considering the number of rats he should bring. Too many and the Captain might sniff them out and bolt—the Captain was the cagiest creature Mephetic had ever dealt with, cagier than any weasel, polecat, or fox. Too few, of course, and the Captain’s crew would gun their way out, because as cagey as the Captain was, he was every bit as tough, and the animals he’d assembled were even tougher. Mephetic had decided to err on too many—at least that way he didn’t run the risk of ending up a corpse. The Captain wasn’t the only cagey thing living in the Gardens.