The Builders
Page 10
It had been used to crown the Lords and Ladies of the Gardens for untold generations, it was gold and silver; it was cool stone and buffed ivory; it was soft samite and thick Oriental silk. From the stained-glass windows above, the Toads’ forebears observed the proceedings with regal disinterest. The throne was large enough to have accommodated a wolfhound, and Mephetic, lounging on the lip, seemed lost amid its grandeur. He had one hand on a box detonator, a coil of string leading off into the darkness. He had the other around a bottle of brown liquor.
“You might not believe this, but I’m about to do you a favor.”
“Yeah?”
“Absolutely. Being in charge of the Gardens is not all it’s cracked up to be. Monetary policy, tax revenue, the bureaucracy . . . Trust me, it’s mostly hassle. Taking it was the only part I really liked.”
“Where’s the Younger?”
“Struggling with an opium suppository, if I had to guess. The Lord is not one to let a little thing like revolution get in the way of pleasure. Anyway, who cares? He was never the point of the thing.”
“No,” the Captain agreed. “Just want to make sure it all gets wrapped up.”
“I’ve rigged enough dynamite to send the entire inner keep to the moon,” Mephetic said, laughing. “Don’t worry. We’ll be taking the Lord with us.” Mephetic took a long, slow slug of whiskey, making sure to keep an eye on the Captain while he did so. When he was done, he put the top on the bottle and tossed it to the mouse. “One last nip before we meet the devil?”
The Captain caught it with one hand, uncorked it, and took a swig. The other hand he raised above his head.
Chapter 52: Resolution
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 fired.
Chapter 53: The Builders
There was the sound of a window breaking, and then Mephetic’s head disappeared.
Not disappeared, so much as redistributed itself, on the ground and the wall and the throne itself. The Captain waved again, unnecessarily. Boudica had seen well enough to make the shot; of course she could see well enough to know she hadn’t missed. Not that Boudica ever missed.
The Captain drank what was left in the bottle with one protracted gulp. Then he let it shatter against the floor and moved on, swiftly but not hurrying, into the hallway that lay beyond the throne room.
The corridor stank terribly, and it stank worse the farther he went, and the Captain knew he was close. At the end of the passageway was a door, and beyond that door was a room, and inside that room was evidence that no creature should have all its desires fulfilled. The chamber was as foul as any abattoir, cut-rate whorehouse, or public toilet. The Captain had not seen the creature that breathed at the center of it for ten years, since before the start of the War of the Two Brothers, and in the interim he had gotten fatter and nastier but not fundamentally different in any other way.
The Lord was larger than any toad you’d ever expect to see, nearly as big as Barley was, or had been, or whatever. Though of course the badger’s size had been mostly muscle, whereas the Lord was so grotesquely obese that he couldn’t walk unaided, could only lift his arms with difficulty. The collection of warts, humps, swollen bulges, and goiters would have done credit to a colony of lepers. His eyes were as dim as a miner’s candle, and it took him a long time to react to this new development.
“You,” the Lord said. Somewhere in the dim recesses of his amphibious brain, a brain that had long been subject to the degrading effects of every vice and narcotic that had ever been invented or distilled, a connection was made. “I remember you. You were . . . you were my brother’s, weren’t you?”
“He was mine, would be a better way of putting it.”
The Lord looked at the Captain slyly for a moment, and asked, “Are you real?”
“Real as anything.”
“Then those sounds I was hearing, all that gunfire and screaming—that was real too? Not just inside my mind?”
The Captain nodded.
The Lord took a few long seconds to work through the arithmetic. “Then that means you’re here to kill me.”
“You weren’t first on the list,” the Captain informed him. “But you are the last one left.”
The Lord did not say anything for a long time. He was working very hard to piece the puzzle together, though it was no easy thing for a creature who had been required to do nothing more difficult than light his hash pipe for the better part of a decade.
But he managed it, and in doing so he received a sudden and unexpected burst of energy, one that propelled him into monologue. “Well? Where is he? Where is my elder brother, who has so long been absent from my bosom? Let me show him all the deference due one whose birth was a full five minutes before my own.” The toad’s face, unlovely under the best of circumstances, was further marred with the molasses-thick swell of fraternal hatred. It had been so long since the toad had been required to perform any physical act more tiring than evacuating waste or receiving pleasure that even this short oration left him exhausted and out of breath, his warty hide rising and falling, rising and falling.
The Captain didn’t say anything for a while, just watched the Lord try to breathe. He was carrying a small burden on his back, and he removed it and rolled it out onto the floor.
The Lord’s eyes throbbed out from his skull. His mouth hung open; his tongue uncoiled itself until it nearly touched the fat of his belly.
Laid against the bed of the now-unraveled satchel was a collection of bones picked clean by time. Amid these remnants was a jet-white skull, a skull that was unquestionably that of a toad.
“I know he was alive when he reached the Kingdom to the South,” the Captain said. “So he must have died some time afterward. It might have been natural. Or it might not have been. I suppose down there they figured he kept his value as a potential threat, so long as Mephetic never found out.”
“But . . . then . . .” The Lord’s great bulbous jaw jiggled inanely. “What was the point?”
The last Lord of the Gardens died miserably and without fanfare, the Captain offering both barrels, shrapnel spreading putrescent green rot against the wall. The toad was so corpulent that at first it seemed the loss of a half his body weight wouldn’t be enough to kill him, and the Captain started to reload his weapon. But then the Lord let out a loud, wet fart, near as foul as Mephetic’s stink, and he slunk down into his chair.
When the Captain got back to the throne room he found an ancient vole in faded livery, looking out the window at the ruined keep below, and the city beyond it which would soon see nothing but chaos, and the country past that which would know the same. “So much death,” he said. “So much death.”
The Captain stopped in front of him and shrugged, as if he had seen more.
“What happens now?” the servant asked, too old to be frightened. “The keep is in ruins, the country devastated. All this slaughter, and what will come of it? Who will rule the Gardens now? Who will rebuild?”
The Captain pulled out a cigar from beneath his coat. The Captain cut the tip off. The Captain put it to his mouth. The Captain lit the end. The Captain breathed in deep, and exhaled a river of smoke.
“We don’t build.”
Acknowledgments
The Builders has a special place in my heart, being essentially a one-note joke that remains funny for me five-odd years after I came up with it—thanks to you, the reader, for indulging my adolescent sensibilities! Professional thanks to Justin Landon, Lee Harris, Jared Shurin, and Chris Kepner. Aesthetic appreciation to my obvious stylistic influences, including but not limited to Frederick Forsyth, Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, and William Goldman. Thanks to family and friends; for the roll call you can look at every other book I published and strike off the ex-girlfriends.
About the Author
Daniel Polansky was born in Baltimore in 1984. He was living in Brooklyn when he wrote this, but by t
he time you read it he might be somewhere else.
Also by Daniel Polansky
The Low Town Series
The Straight Razor Cure
Tomorrow, the Killing
She Who Waits
The Empty Throne Series
Those Above
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Part the First
Chapter 1: A Mouse Walks into a Bar . . .
Chapter 2: A Stoat and a Frenchman
Chapter 3: Bonsoir’s Arrival
Chapter 4: The Virtues of Silence
Chapter 5: Boudica’s Arrival
Chapter 6: The Dragon’s Lair
Chapter 7: Cinnabar’s Arrival
Chapter 8: A Well-Earned Retirement
Chapter 9: Barley’s Arrival
Chapter 10: Our Old Friend, the Devil
Chapter 11: Gertrude’s Arrival
Chapter 12: Elf
Chapter 13: The Plan
Chapter 14: Later . . .
Chapter 15: And Later . . .
Chapter 16: And Yet Later . . .
Chapter 17: And Later Still . . .
Chapter 18: So Late as to Be Early . . .
Chapter 19: The Power Behind the Throne
Part the Second
Chapter 20: South of the Border
Chapter 21: A Killer’s Pride
Chapter 22: The Price of Certainty
Chapter 23: A Loud Death Rattle
Chapter 24: Best Laid Plans
Chapter 25: That Evening . . .
Chapter 26: With Less Liquor Than Earlier . . .
Chapter 27: With the Jugs Half-Empty . . .
Chapter 28: As the Stocks Grew Low . . .
Chapter 29: At the Bottom of the Kegs . . .
Chapter 30: A Smoke Before Sleep
Chapter 31: An Expected Reversal
Part the Third
Chapter 32: The Soul of a Shrew
Chapter 33: Just Past Ciudad del Gato . . .
Chapter 34: The Loot
Chapter 35: A Question of Numbers
Part the Fourth
Chapter 36: An Awful End
Chapter 37: A New Cellmate
Chapter 38: Anticipation (1)
Chapter 39: A Friendly Smile
Chapter 40: The Specialist
Chapter 41: Anticipation (2)
Chapter 42: For All Things Are Mortal
Chapter 43: Raison d’Être
Chapter 44: Besting the Reaper
Chapter 45: Question Asked
Chapter 46: Anticipation (3)
Chapter 47: Not a Frenchman
Chapter 48: Question Answered
Chapter 49: Reunion
Chapter 50: Good Night
Chapter 51: One Final Ace
Chapter 52: Resolution
Chapter 53: The Builders
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Daniel Polansky
Newsletter Sign-up
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE BUILDERS
Copyright © 2015 by Daniel Polansky
Cover art copyright © 2015 by Richard Anderson
Edited by Justin Landon
All rights reserved.
A Tor.com Book
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ISBN 978-0-7653-8400-3 (e-book)
ISBN 978-0-7653-8530-7 (trade paperback)
First Edition: November 2015
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