The Builders

by Polansky, Daniel

The Captain turned back to him.

  “How does it end?”

  The Captain widened his lips around his teeth. Some would call that a smile. They would be wrong. “In blood.”

  Chapter 38: Anticipation (1)

  A half-mile out from the inner keep, hanging by her tail in the branches of a tall elm tree, unnoticeable in the darkness, Boudica waited.

  Chapter 39: A Friendly Smile

  Mephetic had told the lieutenant not to lose sight of the mole, not for one second, not even after they’d dropped the mouse off at the dungeons.

  The lieutenant hadn’t seen what the big deal was. The mole was a typical female of her species, dress strained by wallowing fat, all but blind in any sort of light, and those bifocals might be fetching but they weren’t helping her see any better. Even by the standards of a creature that lived underground and ate grubs, Gertrude didn’t seem like much to worry about. She had such a friendly smile, after all.

  Still, it wasn’t the lieutenant’s job to second-guess Mephetic. Gertrude was searched very thoroughly at the gatehouse, two rats relieving her of the pistol in her sleeve and the small knife that was nearly unnoticeable at the top of her boot, and even of a pen case they thought might be used as club. Gertrude suffered the indignity without breaking her smile, the absurdity of their caution obvious to all involved. Afterward they laughed and shook hands, except the lieutenant, who kept a firm eye on Gertrude, and a firm scowl on her as well. Before entering the main building the lieutenant turned back to wave to the guards, but they didn’t see him or were too lazy to answer, and remained on their stools. Faintly annoyed, he continued in behind Gertrude.

  The keep was the biggest and largest and most solid structure in the Capital, in the Gardens, and in any of the neighboring kingdoms. The first walls were massive and imposing, huge slabs of stone that could withstand an artillery shell from close range and not quiver. Inside was a second citadel, the inner keep, small only by the standards of the structure that surrounded it. You’d need an army ten times the size of what Mephetic possessed to besiege it successfully, and even then you’d still need to starve out the garrison. The lieutenant led Gertrude deeper into the castle, past checkpoint after checkpoint of fierce rat guards. At every interval they were stopped to make sure the lieutenant was who he said he was, that the prisoner hadn’t pulled a fast one or somehow subverted her captor. At every interval the mole was respectful, amiable even, laughing and glad-handing with the rat guards. Still, the lieutenant didn’t let his guard down. There must be something about this mole, if Mephetic had been so worried about her.

  They came finally to the boss’s office, the nerve center for the whole kingdom. In four years, the lieutenant had never seen the Toad himself—the Lord, he meant, the Lord, you’d catch hell if you forgot that one. Mephetic liked to keep up the pretense, though even the blind beggars in the slums knew the Younger wasn’t running anything.

  “You’ve done a fine job, Lieutenant,” Gertrude said, as they waited for the door to open. “Mephetic will surely look kindly on you for overseeing something of this importance.” The mole leaned in and settled one hand on his wrist, as if to assure him. “You’ll make captain by next year—and think how proud your litter will be!”

  The lieutenant thanked Gertrude and did indeed think about how happy his pups would be to hear of his promotion, and how he might spend the raise on a toy boat for Alus and a new dress for Serah’s doll and a spinning top for Tomas Jr. and . . .

  Two scowling rats opened the door, nodded at the lieutenant, and gestured warily for the mole to come in. Well, they could hardly be blamed, though if the lieutenant knew Gertrude, and he felt he did, even after just these few moments, it wouldn’t be long before she melted their icy demeanor.

  The boss’s office was the size of a large dining room, heavy oak shelves full of books that the lieutenant had never seen the boss read, not that there was any reason the boss would feel that this was an activity aided by the lieutenant’s presence. There was a desk as heavy as a boulder in the center of the room, and after a bit of time—enough to reinforce that the boss was the boss and you were not—Mephetic came in through a back door and stood in front of it. The lieutenant could tell how happy he was by his smile, which was wide and open, and his tail, which was flaring up and down ever so slightly.

  “Why the Underground Man?” he asked Gertrude.

  “Instead of Underground Woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Underground Man sounds scarier.”

  “That’s true,” Mephetic agreed. “If I’d had any idea that you were the creature behind organized crime in the city, I’d have . . .”

  “Killed me?” Gertrude asked, as if she found nothing particularly objectionable about the notion. “I thought you might feel something like that, which is why I made sure you never learned.”

  The lieutenant waited until he thought no one was looking, then loosened his collar.

  “I’m glad, at least, that you had the good sense to contact me early on in this escapade,” Mephetic said. “That mouse needs to learn when he’s beaten.”

  “It won’t take. You’ll have to kill him.”

  “I think that’s something we can arrange.”

  Was it hot in here? the lieutenant wondered. The day had been blazing, but the evening had cooled down somewhat—or at least that was what he had been thinking on his way in. But now he was sweating buckshot, could feel it mat down his fur.

  “Imagine spending all this time obsessed with something as pointless as revenge,” Mephetic said. “That was always the problem with the Captain, if you don’t mind me saying so. He was too strong a hater.”

  “I think perhaps there is no creature in the Gardens with such a talent for it,” Gertrude answered, “and so you can hardly be surprised that he chooses to exercise his ability. Fish swim, birds fly, the Captain hates.”

  “Though not for very much longer.”

  “It would have been easier if you’d let me know you had another creature on the inside.”

  “I figured for someone of your abilities, it didn’t need to be easy.”

  “No, indeed,” the mole said, smiling her fool-false smile. “I quite enjoy the challenge.”

  The boss said something, but the lieutenant couldn’t quite make it out. If he was being honest, the lieutenant would have had to say that, what with how hot it had gotten, he was no longer as interested in the conversation as he had been. The boss repeated whatever he said, though it took a repetition of that repetition before the lieutenant could finally understand it.

  “Lieutenant,” Mephetic asked, “what the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I assume it’s the poison I gave him,” Gertrude said. “A concoction of my own making—largely painless, though quite fast-acting.”

  The lieutenant realized he was on the ground and wondered for a moment how he had gotten there. But it was growing dark, and he turned his mind back to his dam, and his pups, and he hoped they wouldn’t miss him too terribly.

  Mephetic went for the pistol in his belt, but Gertrude moved with a speed that would have been astonishing in any animal, let alone one who had never before shown any more dexterity than what was required to tie her shoes. A long, heavy needle, the same one that had poisoned half the guards Gertrude had come in contact with since being brought into the citadel, sailed through the air and slammed against Mephetic’s drawn revolver, sending the weapon spinning off onto the floor.

  The two rats still living, a notch slower than Mephetic and any number of notches slower than Gertrude (a notch not being a literal measurement of speed) went for their own weapons then, though of course it was far too late. Gertrude spread her arms wide, as if in supplication or to offer an embrace, and one thin bit of metal flew into one of the rats, and another thin bit of metal flew into the other, and then it was just Mephetic and the Underground Man alive in the room. And probably not both of them for very much longer.

  “A double-cross,” Mephet
ic said. It had been a long time since he’d done his own killing, and apart from his lost gun, he had nothing but a wavy-bladed knife, which he drew swiftly.

  “I think this would be a triple-cross, actually, though at some point the sums get hard to do without pen and paper.” If Gertrude had any other weapons on her person, she made no move for them, her hands clasped together as if in prayer.

  Mephetic feinted left and took a swipe at her, but Gertrude didn’t so much as quiver at the ruse, and so neatly dodged the attack itself that for a moment Mephetic got the impression he was fighting not a plump, hairy mole, but some creature composed of the very ether itself.

  “I’ve still got the Captain,” Mephetic said, trying to land a verbal blow if he couldn’t manage a physical one.

  “Not for much longer, I should think. On behalf of the Captain, I’d very much like to thank you for offering us ingress into your impregnable abode. Our impregnable abode, I should very soon say.”

  Mephetic roared and tossed his blade at Gertrude, turning end over end, though by the time it reached the space Gertrude had occupied a scant second earlier Gertrude was no longer occupying it.

  Which in fact Mephetic had predicted, having belatedly come to recognize the mole’s unnatural speed, a speed that was contrary to her species and indeed to her physical makeup. In fact the skunk, though he had misplayed this particular game, misplayed it quite thoroughly indeed, was no dullard. You will find that skunks as a species are quite clever, as well as being relatively fast and hard to kill.

  Though of course, this is not what skunks are famous for. Skunks are famous for one thing and one thing only, and this was the emission that, dropping swiftly and swinging his bushy tail around, Mephetic released from his anal glands, a pulse of foulness that crowded thick through the close air.

  Chapter 40: The Specialist

  Bonsoir slipped a claw into the outer door of the citadel, just before it banged shut. He waited a few seconds to make sure Gertrude had taken care of her end, then tailed afterward. Two dead rats testified to the mole’s competence, not that Bonsoir had been foolish enough to doubt it. There was a reason everyone feared the Underground Man. Her reputation did not rest on sand.

  Nor was Bonsoir’s. He picked the lock on the next door and scampered ahead, as confident in the reinforcements as he had been in the advance force. Gertrude had marked the trail—it was Bonsoir’s job to bust it wide open.

  Though, in truth, it was a task unworthy of an animal of Bonsoir’s talent. The mole had left most of the guards she’d passed dead or rapidly dying, purple-faced or with thick trails of blood leaking from their canines, victims of the seemingly endless packets of poison Gertrude carried on her person. All Bonsoir had to do was take care of the stragglers and make sure all the doors were unlocked, and he had trouble with neither. It didn’t hurt that he had lived and worked in the palace for years, knew it like the back of his own black-furred hand.

  Bonsoir stopped just short of the antechamber leading into what had been the Captain’s office some years earlier. Two guards still waited outside; for some reason Gertrude hadn’t managed to find a way to kill either of them. The mole is slipping, Bonsoir thought to himself, though he did not really believe it. The first rat had a knife in his throat all of a sudden, collapsing to the ground so swiftly and so quietly that at first his counterpart seemed to think he had fainted, was bent over trying to revive him when another of Bonsoir’s daggers opened a hole in his esophagus through which you could see his spine.

  Bonsoir made sure to avoid the blood his handiwork had sent splattering onto the wall. He was a professional, after all.

  His task completed, Bonsoir slipped off into the surrounding corridors, knives on his belt and dynamite in his pack, anxious to see what mischief his expertise might wreak.

  Chapter 41: Anticipation (2)

  A half-mile out from the inner keep, hanging by her tail in the branches of a tall elm tree, unnoticeable in the darkness, Boudica waited.

  Chapter 42: For All Things Are Mortal

  Bonsoir had taken care of the guards outside the throne room but he hadn’t done anything about the door itself. The Captain was a competent lock pick himself, as was Cinnabar, but it was easier just to have Barley break it down, which was what they did, the badger rushing against the door and then rushing right back out again, retching up the eggs he’d eaten for breakfast and the whiskey he’d drunk for lunch. With the door open, Mephetic’s emanations came billowing out, and rather than join Barley’s example Cinnabar and the Captain retreated back down the corridor. The badger followed as soon as he was able, and they let the stink filter out awhile before returning.

  Gertrude had died hard. A full blast of Mephetic’s reek and still she had struggled, crawling facedown toward the door, her blood streaking against the marble floor. But she had managed to right herself before expiring, leaning against a wall, slump-shouldered, her face mute with the agony of her final moments. The stench that came off her corpse was uncanny, unbearable though Cinnabar bore it, kneeling down beside her, holding his hat to his chest.

  “Rough way to die,” Barley said, but this was as far as his sympathies went. He had never liked the Underground Man, particularly, and anyway, none of them were very likely to survive till morning.

  “Let’s go,” the Captain said.

  But Cinnabar didn’t answer.

  “Cinnabar.”

  “One moment.”

  “We don’t have the time.”

  Everyone knows, of course, that salamanders are a breed apart. Their blood is cold, their humours bitter; they know neither sympathy nor passion. They take no lovers, only mates, and they don’t have friends, only allies, and even then only so long as they’re convenient. Everyone knows that. Everyone.

  “There’s time if I say there’s time,” Cinnabar said.

  The Captain stared at him for a long moment but in the end it seemed he agreed, or at least he did not move onward. Cinnabar looked back down at Gertrude and said nothing further. Somewhere below there was the sound of an explosion and the floor rocked uneasily. Something screamed, and then stopped screaming. Gertrude’s eyes were wide and red veined and despairing. Cinnabar closed them and stood. “All right,” he said.

  Chapter 43: Raison d’Être

  Bonsoir was having a grand time.

  The Captain had been right, that first night when he had come recruiting. Bonsoir had been wasting his time in dusty border towns, amid rundown bars—and more than his time, he had been wasting his genius.

  Everything had a purpose, that was the way Bonsoir saw it. Bees make honey, songbirds trill, pretty females strut down the sidewalk on sunny afternoons and pretend they do not know you are looking at them. The rest of the crew, Barley and Cinnabar and so on, they were kick-down-the-door types, guns-blazing types, die-in-the-spotlight-with-blood-on-their-grin types. Not Bonsoir. Bonsoir scuttled down darkened corridors and brought sleep with him—not even death, death was too strong a word for what he brought, for the silence that descended when he came. That was Bonsoir’s purpose, that was why Bonsoir existed. And what is more joyous than to act according to our innermost nature?

  Which brings us back to: Bonsoir was having a grand time.

  Though it must be said, Bonsoir’s mind was not occupied solely with pleasure. It had occurred to Bonsoir—if he was to be absolutely honest, which he wouldn’t have been—it had occurred to Bonsoir some days earlier that he could still remember the location of the treasure vault, hidden deep within the subterranean layers of the inner keep. And it had also occurred to Bonsoir that this vault, which under normal circumstances would have been so thickly guarded that even Bonsoir couldn’t have had much hope of breaking into it, would, under these current conditions, likely be denuded of its normal compliment of soldiers. Worth looking into, at least. It was all well and good to enjoy your business, but Bonsoir was a professional, as has been mentioned, and a professional does not work for free.

  There were so
me rats guarding the treasure chamber, though not nearly as many as usual. To get through them Bonsoir had to act with less subtlety than he preferred, tossing one of his few remaining sticks of dynamite, then coming in hard and fast with his knives in the second after it exploded. One of the rats got a shot off, but it went wide, and he didn’t get a second. When the smoke cleared there were Bonsoir and three dead rats and a multicolored collage on the wall that Bonsoir assumed were the remains of a fourth.

  It took nearly half an hour for Bonsoir to pick the lock, and he did not think he was being unduly arrogant—though Bonsoir was, admittedly, titanic in his self-regard—in saying that there was not another creature alive who could have managed it in twice the time. Still, it was longer than he liked to spend out in the open, with his back turned, and he felt his heart trill when the lock snicked open, and he could slip inside.

  Awaiting him was a clear blue spring to a creature dying of thirst; awaiting him were a mother’s arms to a weeping babe; awaiting him was that final moment of release for which all living things secretly long. Even in these late days, after five years of misrule by Mephetic and five before that of civil war, the Gardens were a prosperous place, and the tax collectors ever busy. There were walls of scrip of all sorts, scrip from every one of the major banks and most of the kingdoms back east. But what is scrip, when compared with hard gold, heavy octagonal coins in thick cloth sacks, bars laid crossways? And what is gold compared to the innumerable glittering treasures, sterling jewelry and fat gemstones, emeralds and rubies and diamonds and things for which Bonsoir did not know the name?

  It was the most beautiful sight that Bonsoir had ever seen, and he could not be blamed, or at least he could not have been blamed much, for the moment of shock that followed, for dropping his guard and staring in wonder at the wealth better than love that was now his.