The Builders

by Polansky, Daniel

  But blame him or not, he paid for it.

  “What a fascinating development,” a voice said from behind him.

  Bonsoir snarled and turned to throw one of his knives and felt something explode in the center of his torso. At first it was more a sensation of force than pain, but the pain came quickly on its heels, and the pain was worse than anything he had felt in a long life of misery. Then he was on the ground, and above him stood the handsomest little white cat you could ever want to see, grinning from ear to ear and watching Bonsoir bleed.

  “By Cromwell’s ghost,” Puss said, “I hope they’re not all in the bag so easy.”

  Chapter 44: Besting the Reaper

  They were running through one of the many courtyards, heading toward the inner keep, Cinnabar in front, then the Captain, then Barley. They had given up being quiet but they were still trying to be quick, and so far they’d had no trouble, Cinnabar’s hands making a handful of rats into a handful of corpses.

  They had just passed the main guardhouse when the alarm bells began to ring. The Captain looked at Barley but didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to say anything; Barley had already unlimbered his cannon from off of his back, was checking on each of the little spinning bits and smiling brightly. The Captain continued on the way he was going, toward the heart of the castle. Cinnabar bothered with a good-bye, an uncharacteristic bit of sentimentality for the Dragon—and an unnecessary one.

  Because Barley wasn’t paying any attention; his eyes were huge and they were fixed on the guardhouse, and he wore a smile that was more of a leer, and after a quick moment, a very quick moment, Cinnabar followed the Captain, sprinting toward the inner keep. Barley gave the barrel of his gun one last spin, heard its familiar clickety-clack, and smiled wider. He began to walk backward slowly, till his great mass was blocking the path that the Captain had escaped down. He counted the seconds. He was as happy as a pup on Christmas morning, as a maid on her wedding night, as a wolf before his bloody red supper.

  The first group of guards came out of the entrance, guns drawn and eyes wide with excitement, or perhaps terror. For certain it was terror in the next moment, the darkness of the courtyard lit by the muzzle-flash of the organ gun, a muzzle-flash that was blinding bright, a muzzle-flash that brought death with such speed and in such numbers that it seemed scarcely conceivable. Soon there was nothing left in the guardhouse—nothing left alive, I mean—and then and only then did Barley’s gun go silent.

  But it started up again a few minutes later, when reinforcements arrived, as loud as before and to the same effect. It took the rats a long time to realize they were better off not sprinting straight into the courtyard—rats are not known for their tactical sense. Really rats aren’t known for much, except for being numerous and dying easily.

  Or at least they died easily that day, even after they started taking cover in the surrounding buildings and trying to snipe at Barley. He was well positioned in the dark, and at this point the mounds of corpses he had made acted as cover. It took twenty minutes for one of the cleverer rodents to remember the heavy artillery, and another twenty to wheel one out from its position on the battlements. They wasted a lot of ammo finding the proper range, though they did a good job of destroying large sections of the castle.

  And in the meantime Barley continued his work, rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat. And to find an equal to his tally, to do that bloody arithmetic—if one was inclined to do so, if one’s mind ran in that sort of direction—one would have needed to compare him against disease, and time, and heartbreak.

  Barley’s body was never found. Of course, it wouldn’t have been found even if it was there, not buried under all that rubble. Maybe, after the thing was over, after all of the killing was done, he shouldered up his cannon and disappeared again, this time making sure he buried himself so deep that no one, not even the Captain, could find him again. Or maybe the rats caught him with a shot from the howitzer, one of those shells goes off nearby and there’s no need to worry about burial, not for a badger or a St. Bernard or a blue whale.

  All that can be said with certainty is that when Barley did shuffle into the darkness, as all of us must, he had company waiting to meet him.

  Chapter 45: Question Asked

  Cinnabar was winding his way through the courtyard, the Captain in tow. The night echoed with Barley’s covering fire, even a long way distant, drowning out the usual evening sounds. But all of a sudden, just the same, Cinnabar stopped, and the Captain stopped after him.

  “What’s going on?” the Captain asked, wise enough to know Cinnabar didn’t do anything pointlessly.

  “You go on ahead,” Cinnabar said simply. “I’ve got business.”

  “You need any help?”

  “No.”

  For a moment it seemed the Captain would say something. Cinnabar was his oldest friend, if the Captain could be said to have those. But perhaps he couldn’t, because in the end he just scowled a little harder and hurried off.

  When Brontë slipped from the shadows it was impossible to imagine she could have remained hidden for so long, given her size. But Brontë wasn’t just big; Brontë was quick, and Brontë was agile, and if it hadn’t been for Cinnabar’s strangely keen perception Brontë might never have been noticed at all.

  “I could have killed you both, just then,” Brontë said, tapping the handle of the blunderbuss at her hip.

  “You could have tried,” Cinnabar said, rolling a cigarette.

  Brontë was no stranger to the act itself, but never in her life had she seen it performed with such rapid precision, as if the salamander had willed the thing into existence. Maybe this made her nervous, and maybe that was why she started to talk.

  “All the stories about you, I admit I’d expected more. The deadliest creature in the Gardens, the greatest gunslinger ever to slap iron. Mephetic still talks about you, about how many of his soldiers you killed. About some shoot-out near Black Fork where you put an entire family of rabbits into the ground in one go. And here you are, a mottled cold-blood in an old hat. But then I suppose that’s the way of legends, to grow over-large in the telling.”

  Cinnabar sighed. How many times had he heard this line, how many dozens, maybe hundreds? Some mean-looking animal on the other end, trying to convince themselves that Cinnabar wasn’t the most dangerous thing the gods had ever made. It had gotten so damn tiring, being the Dragon. If he had it to do again, Cinnabar sometimes thought, he wouldn’t have become it.

  Cinnabar lit his cigarette, took a long, slow drag on it, then let it fall to the ground and stamped it out with his heel. “I guess I should be easy killing, then.”

  Brontë’s smile was mostly fang. “Deserved or not, you’ve got a big name. And when you die, I’ll have a bigger one. Dragonslayer.” Brontë let her palm stray down to her double-barreled cannon. “Dragonslayer. I like it.”

  Cinnabar didn’t bother to respond, nor even to move his hands closer to his weapons. His eyes might have been taking in Brontë’s movements, or they might have been staring at the moon that had risen, full and bright and beautiful, above the turrets of the inner keep.

  Brontë went for her gun.

  Chapter 46: Anticipation (3)

  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 adjusted her sights.

  Chapter 47: Not a Frenchman

  Bonsoir did not die neatly.

  He was not a large creature, but he had a heart that belied his size, as does every trueborn son of Gaul. “You ought to take great pride, silly little kitten-creature,” Bonsoir said. One hand pressed sharp against the hole in his stomach. The second pulled a crumpled cigarette from where it had rested behind his ear, set it in a mouth that was filling rapidly with blood, and lit it with a match. “For you have killed Bonsoir, the greatest assassin that Provence has ever produced.”

  Puss cocked his head, looked over at the several rats that had come into the treasure room after him
, looked back at Bonsoir. “Excuse me?”

  “I said you have killed Bonsoir, cousin of death; Bonsoir, who strikes in the night; Bonsoir, who—”

  “What is that absurd accent?”

  Bonsoir coughed up smoke, then blood. “If you had not put me down from behind, like the dastard you are, Bonsoir would make you pay for the disrespect you show to his homeland.”

  “Your homeland, is it? Et où êtes-vous, vous idiot peu hermine? Vous stupide, putois merde cerveau? Votre purulente, imbécile, faux chose?”

  Bonsoir didn’t answer.

  “No? Nothing? It’s been so long since you’ve practiced your native tongue that you cannot even bother to recognize it?”

  Still Bonsoir did not answer, though his eyes flashed with such hatred as one rarely sees apart from creatures who at one point loved one another.

  “Are they such imbeciles in this country as not to have picked up on this mad deceit? How long have you been playing this absurd game? You’re no more French than I am Sultan of Turkey!”

  Puss laughed uproariously and turned to the rats that he had brought as backup, who laughed as well, less because they got the joke and more because you laugh if the creature above you laughs—at least you do if you are a rat, who are creatures not unpracticed in obsequiousness. Puss giggled and guffawed, Puss chuckled and chortled, Puss cackled and tittered and howled, Puss all but ruptured his diaphragm in amusement.

  It was a very loud laugh. It was not, however, the last one.

  Chapter 48: Question Answered

  Perhaps, somewhere in the world, since the dawn of history, there was someone as fast as Cinnabar. The Gardens are vast, and time is long. Regardless, Brontë was not that creature. Before she had unholstered her weapon Cinnabar had released an entire chamber from the revolver on his right hip, fanning a cluster of shots that curdled the cream of the fox’s eye a cherry red. Brontë screamed and let off a shot that flew well to the left of the salamander, who by this point had dropped his empty revolver and repeated the trick with its full twin, sending another round of metal into the neck and scalp of the fox.

  Brontë would never be as fast as Cinnabar, nowhere near, but she was a damn sight bigger. The dozen pricks of lead the Dragon had set into her flesh were insufficient to put her down, indeed barely enough to slow her. As the salamander dropped his empty weapon and moved to draw the one from his boot Brontë fired the second barrel on her blunderbuss.

  Nothing is faster than a bullet, but Cinnabar was close. As Brontë’s hand cannon erupted Cinnabar dropped low to the ground and launched himself sideways. If the fox’s weapon fired solid shot he might even have made it, but as it was the outer edge of the cloud of shrapnel ripped into Cinnabar’s side, leaving bits of entrails peeking through his skin.

  Her ammunition depleted, Brontë dove at Cinnabar, anxious to finish with claws and teeth what she had started with her pearl-handled shotgun. Off-balance from his wounds, the salamander still managed to dance aside, sending another wave of fire into her torso.

  To little enough avail. Every shot Cinnabar had fired found purchase in the more sensitive portions of Brontë’s flesh, but each injury seemed only to enrage her further. She turned back around on the salamander, hissed madly, and charged a second time.

  This time Cinnabar didn’t try to dodge. With an agility that belied the leaking corner of his intestine he unlimbered the half-rifle and steadied it at the coming behemoth. Cinnabar’s hands worked the lever, sent a flurry of lead into his enemy. Tufts of pink brain and white bone and red fur flew out of Brontë’s skull, but it did nothing to slow her momentum. She barreled forward with sufficient force to topple the Dragon, already unsteady from his wounds. They tumbled together, Brontë dead but not knowing it, Cinnabar dying and certain of the fact.

  When it was done Cinnabar lay pinned beneath the aerated corpse of the fox, now finally still. Cinnabar’s hat, which had been knocked off in the struggle, was a few inches out of his reach. He strained with every fiber of the part of his body that still worked, grabbed the Stetson, and set it over his forehead.

  Then he sighed, and stared up at the moon, and breathed once more, and allowed himself to die.

  Chapter 49: Reunion

  The Captain hurried toward the inner keep, sprinting along the high edge of the ramparts, alone so far as could be seen. Barley’s cannon went silent, finally, and the night returned to its stillness. And then that stillness—which was a false stillness, a stillness that is the preface to noise—was filled with a low shuddering, the sound of an unclean death.

  Some creatures say that the rattlesnake is misunderstood, that he makes his telltale sound to warn of his danger and ward off misfortune for all parties. Some creatures are fools. No snake can be trusted, and the rattler least of all. He does not rattle to alert—he rattles to threaten, he rattles to mock. He rattles to let you know that he can bring you death, if he so chooses, and that doing so would be a joy for him, indeed would be his chief joy.

  The sound got louder and louder, and then it was joined by scale slithering along stone, and finally by the sight of the snake’s flesh, pale as an exsanguinated corpse.

  “Captain,” the Quaker said, the last word elongated over his forked tongue. “How long it’s been, and how much I have missed you, you and all my old companions.”

  When last the Captain had seen the Quaker he had been young and bright green and filled three-deep with creatures he had swallowed during that last horrible evening, creatures who had thought themselves friends to the beast, who were foolish enough to imagine that a serpent has a heart in any but the most literal sense.

  The Captain didn’t move, his hands in the pockets of his duster, a scowl on his face. “Did you now? All of us?”

  “Alas for Gertrude, amiable as fair death! I take it that was Barley making so much noise earlier. But there is no noise any longer, is there, and I suppose we can guess what that means. Bonsoir always preferred silence; one way or the other I won’t be seeing him. And I know that Brontë had a special surprise prepared for Cinnabar, though I doubt things will work out quite the way the fox planned.”

  “And?”

  “Boudica? But she won’t be anywhere nearby.”

  “And?” the Captain asked. “And? And?”

  Quaker looked at the Captain a long while. Then he looked all about himself, into the deep dark stillness of the night. Then he smiled.

  Elf shot from one of the crevices that the evening reserves for itself, shrieking her shriek that was the last thing so many creatures had heard, squirrels and mice and rats and bats and polecats and skunks. Where had she been? Not so small a bird, if not so large either, and she couldn’t fly anymore, hobbled by the click-click-click of her talons. But that night she had moved as stealthily as Bonsoir, or a shadow, which was to say the same thing.

  They moved with a speed that was impossible to follow, feinting and striking, each attack shading imperceptibly into the next such that determining individual movements was impossible. The Quaker snapped and twisted, hoping to wrap himself around his old lover in one final, deadly embrace. Elf avoided this kindness, offering her own with a beak that shone bright in the moonlight, and talons that she’d kept sharp as her hate. She should have been easy prey for the snake, old and mottled and flightless as she was. But this proved not to be the case, for after a full forty-five seconds—which is an eternity in mortal combat, which is longer than perhaps any other creature in the Gardens would have lasted with either—the contest remained undecided.

  Furious at this difficulty, the Quaker turned smoothly from Elf and launched himself at the Captain, as swiftly as a ball from a cannon, with no doubt the same effect had he reached the mouse. But in the instant before he would have struck, Elf intercepted the Quaker’s movement with one of her own, just as potent and fierce; with a flap of her wings she cast herself forward into the rattler, claws finding the soft tissue around his eyes. The Quaker did not scream: not when the blood began to come swiftly down h
is face, not when the force of Elf’s attack carried both of them tumbling out over the walls and down into the ether, the desperate and hoped-for outcome, a fatal embrace descending, together forever, into the darkness.

  Chapter 50: Good Night

  “Imagine,” Puss continued, gesturing widely to his soldiers. “Years affecting this mad conceit, and no one ever bothered to call him on it! What strange, pathetic creatures you breed on this side of the pond! This sad little ermine has spent the entirety of his life pretending to be something he is not, as if massacring his vowels offered some patina of class. What is that sound?”

  What was that sound? It was something like sand leaking through an hourglass, or silk running across a lady’s hand. It wasn’t either of these things, of course, though it had more in common with the first.

  What it was, in fact, as Puss realized after he had turned around, was the thin little string attached to the end of Bonsoir’s last stick of dynamite rapidly being eaten away by flame.

  “I am not an ermine!” Bonsoir said, blood bubbling up past his smile.

  Puss’s eyes went very wide. He prepared to do something, though what that something would have been never did become clear.

  Puss was cultured, Puss was clever, Puss was fast and cruel and deadly—but Puss was not wise. For, if Bonsoir was no Frenchman, he was, most certainly, a stoat. And if a Frenchman is many things, at the end of the day, a stoat is only one—a killer.

  And now the fuse was a fingernail, and now a hair’s breadth.

  “Bonsoir!” Bonsoir said.

  Chapter 51: One Final Ace

  The Captain entered the inner keep as alone in reality as he had always been in spirit. He skirted from shadow to shadow, eyes wary, one hand on the shotgun strapped to his back—but there arrived no excuse for using it, and he passed into the throne room without incident.