by K. Z. Snow
Lizabetta’s was a secluded cottage squatting in the cool shadows of Barleymead Bluff. Its seine of ivy was a thick camouflage that made the house nearly impossible to see. But Fanule had been a regular visitor for over a decade, so he could’ve found the place with his eyes closed.
Long ago Lizabetta had lived in Purinton, at the edge of the Needles district, and worked in one of the mills while discreetly practicing her Craft out of a two-room flat. That was, of course, before her lover murdered and dismembered her as well as her cat.
Fanule first went to the hand pump and filled one of the many jars clustered around it. After he’d plunked the lupine stems into the water, he walked the remaining thirty feet to Lizabetta’s front door and flattened his hand against the rough-hewn boards. He exerted no pressure. He was simply alerting Lizabetta to his presence. Creaking, the door immediately glided open. Glowing pools of lamplight shone in a dim, damp space crowded with dusty shelves and cupboards, books and bottles. A miniature distillery, like an artificial sea creature made up of crocks, tubes, and flasks, bubbled softly in one corner.
Lizabetta’s torso, draped in a simple chemise with drawstring neckline and scalloped hem, sat serenely on her sofa, the folds of white linen stark against the cushions’ port-colored velvet. Lickshank the cat must’ve been outdoors, hunting in the underbrush.
Like the soul, instinct apparently never died.
“Fan!” Lizabetta’s head, semi-translucent and wearing a happy smile, floated from a high shelf at the back of the room. It stopped just above a chair stationed at her central worktable. “Dearest Fan, how I’ve missed you!”
Fanule returned her smile as he took a seat at the opposite side of the table. “Hello, Betty.”
“Oh, you brought me flowers.” She sounded touched.
“I wouldn’t come empty-handed to the home of a witch.” The tabletop wasn’t even visible. Plant sprigs were scattered across papers awash with formulas and diagrams. Fanule eased aside a mortar and pestle and set down the jar. “At the very least, you could give me warts.” He was starting to feel playful. He was leveling again.
“I’ve never had a wart in my life,” Lizabetta said, exaggerating her indignation. “Or my death. So, have you come for more powder?”
“Yes, if you have any.”
“I had a feeling you’d run out. I’ve been concerned.” Lizabetta’s head turned to look at a longer table that stretched beneath a bank of cupboards. She directed the arm that lay on the table to open a door and lift out a stoneware jar. Gripped by the arm’s pale hand, the jar was delivered to Fanule.
“Thank you,” he said. “Do you require payment this time?” Lizabetta had no use for money, unless she needed kerosene for her lamps or materials for her work. She usually gave her products gratis to whomever she liked and trusted.
“No payment,” she said. “I have everything I need at present.”
As her left arm drifted back to its workstation, Fanule asked, “By the way, where are you keeping your legs these days?” She usually had them propped against a wall.
Lizabetta’s head nodded toward the sofa. A pair of bare feet slid out from beneath it, toes wiggling. Fanule laughed.
“They’ve been getting in the way,” Lizabetta said, “Although I don’t need the poor things, except to deliver occasional messages, I’m still fond of them. I remember dancing….” Her voice trailed off wistfully.
Locals assumed it was powerful witchcraft that had allowed Lizabetta to cheat death, at least to the limited degree that she had. But their assumption was incorrect.
As her former lover, Louis Pandemain, had strangled the life out of her, Lizabetta had willed him to dispose of her corpse in Mummikin Bog. She’d long known that mysterious fen could rejoin a spirit with a body, albeit a poor semblance of the body, thus allowing that spirit to function in the world rather than making itself known merely through sporadic raps and footsteps.
So after Pandemain’s jealous rage had played itself out, he’d loaded its results into a wagon and traveled to the dumping ground Lizabetta had suggested. He’d slid those results off a bloody tarpaulin and into Mummikin Bog. Then, after returning to Purinton, he’d gone to the dank, narrow alley behind his mistress’s tenement, wrapped himself in the stained tarpaulin, and shot himself in the head. It had all happened many years ago.
Lizabetta had never told Fanule how she’d come by her knowledge of the bog’s magical properties. In fact, she’d never told him where Mummikin was. But she had advised him, in the strongest terms, never to divulge the secret of her existence.
After a reflective moment, Lizabetta turned her attention back to Fanule. “Please, tell me how you’ve been. Has your condition been interfering terribly much with your life?”
He lowered his eyes to the jar of powder, a careful blend of chamomile, valerian, St. John’s wort, and a half-dozen other substances he couldn’t remember or Lizabetta wouldn’t reveal. “At times,” he said.
At least melancholy, the onset of which he’d feared earlier that morning, hadn’t fully seized him. If it had, Fanule knew he wouldn’t be here. He would be curled up on his bed, as crippled and nearly insensate as a fly without wings. Instead, he felt only a mild depression of energy and mood, and even that was beginning to improve. This episode had been but a shallow dip into the void, not a plunge, and for that he was grateful.
“Have you been finding pleasant diversions, enjoyable companionship?” Lizabetta asked.
“At times,” he said more quietly.
Lizabetta continued to study him. Fanule hadn’t looked up, but he could feel her pale green eyes, thin as a mist, trained on his face.
“Are you lonely?” she asked with great tenderness.
Fanule’s throat tightened. “At times,” he whispered.
Lizabetta’s head floated over to a box on a table beside the sofa. It was covered in countless mirrored tiles, all minute and all of different shapes. After her head lowered itself inside, the top of it gave the box’s lid a gentle bump, and the lid fell into place.
A few moments passed. Lizabetta’s head emerged, wafted over to the table, and stopped beside Fanule. She pulled herself together, arms and torso and neglected legs bobbing slowly through the air to regroup beneath her neck, and held Fanule to her bosom. The embrace was comforting in its way, although Lizabetta’s reassembled body felt too much like cool, semisolid air. And too much like woman.
“Be aware of a man who plucks ribbons….”
Fanule couldn’t quite make out the final phrase. It was either “from her hair” or “from the air.” Lizabetta’s voice was often thickened and slurred in a dazed way when she came out of the gazing box.
He didn’t ask her to repeat herself. Lizabetta never repeated her pronouncements. She claimed that speaking them a second time would negate them, like writing a sentence and then erasing it.
“I wish you were a man,” Fanule murmured.
“My darling Fan,” said Lizabetta as she stroked his hair, “let’s start by wishing I were alive.”
Fanule felt a light touch through the cloth of his trousers. He glanced down. Lickshank’s tail was twining around his calf. Apparently, the rest of the cat hadn’t yet returned from the hunt.
Chapter Three
FANULE was only two miles from the outskirts of Taintwell when he heard a scream… or thought he did. He immediately stopped, forehead furrowed in concentration, and listened. The sounds of a scuffle—grunts, thuds, angry words—filtered through the dense, shadow-clotted woods that abutted the road on one side.
“Let me go! I’ve broken no law! I swear!”
Swift and silent, Fanule crept toward the ruckus. An aeropod outfitted with searchlight and aft-basket had landed in a small clearing. On the ground a canvas sack writhed, continually changing shape. A broad-shouldered man knelt over it.
“If you’d cooperate,” he muttered, “I wouldn’t have to keep you bagged.”
“Please, I beg you to believe me!”
Fanule recognized that voice, the one coming from the sack. It belonged to a 25:75 named Gort Woolcraft, a much-liked resident of Taintwell. Without another thought, Fanule dove at the muscular man and knocked him sideways to the ground.
Stunned, the man growled, “What the—” and immediately began fighting back.
The bastard was strong.
Fanule didn’t squander his breath on talk. He wanted to immobilize the kidnapper first. The man tried to throw him off but failed. He twisted beneath Fanule and tried to land a blow, but his fist merely shot past Fanule’s ear. When he grabbed a handful of hair, Fanule bit him. Howling out a curse, the man attempted to use his legs to gain an advantage, but by then Fanule was incensed. With monumental effort, he pinned the man on his back.
“You,” he said in disgust when he got a good look at the bounty hunter’s face.
“I’m sorry. Have we met?” Simon Bentcross studied Fanule. His gaze lowered and stalled briefly at the mark on Fanule’s neck.
Under other circumstances, the man’s wry, feigned courtesy might have been amusing, but Fanule was in no mood to appreciate wit. “You don’t need to know who I am.”
A corner of the hunter’s mouth lifted. “I believe I already do. Now, Mr. Perfidor, if you’d be kind enough to remove your rather large body from mine….”
“Why did you capture Gort Woolcraft? He wouldn’t harm a flea.”
“Is that you, Fan?” cried Gort, his pathetic voice muffled by the canvas.
Fanule turned his face and called out, “Yes. I’ll get you out of this.”
“For godssake, Perfidor, get off me.” The hunter’s smile widened. “Unless you intend to make love to me.”
Heat flashed through Fanule’s face. He sat up, his weight still resting on his adversary’s legs.
Stupid move.
Bentcross sprang like a mousetrap. Pitching his upper body forward, he rammed his head into Fanule’s midsection. Fanule’s lungs emptied with one harsh expulsion of breath. He toppled to the ground as Bentcross scrambled to his feet. But the hunter fell like timber when Fanule grabbed his ankle and tugged.
They were soon in the same position as before, but Fanule’s temperance had fled along with the air in his body. He stared into the hunter’s brown eyes… and sucked.
“What…?” Bentcross thrashed his head. “I can’t see!”
“Am I able to trust you now?” Fanule asked.
“Yes, yes, on my honor. Oh gods, my skull is splitting open!”
Fanule lowered his eyelids and stopped sucking. Then, dispassionately, he gazed at Bentcross. The man was actually quite handsome in a rough-and-tumble kind of way.
The bounty hunter blinked rapidly and stretched his eyelids. “You are a light sucker,” he gasped.
“How astute of you to notice.”
Fanule got up to free Gort from the canvas sack. The Mongrel was small, bald, and bug-eyed, but he was good natured and kindhearted in addition to being a fine cobbler. Taintwellians were very fond of him.
Once he was in the open air again, Gort grabbed Fanule’s hand and kissed it. “Oh thank you, Fan. Please let me know if you need anything. You’ll have it faster than Fober can fornicate.”
Fanule tossed his head back and laughed. Jusem Fober was Taintwell’s most notorious womanizer. “Please stay here a few minutes longer,” he said, putting a hand on Gort’s shoulder. “I’d like to resolve this. You’ll be free to go after that.”
Gort nodded. Bentcross was now sitting up, elbows on knees, head in hands.
“Let me see your catch-sheet,” Fanule said to him.
Bentcross angled him a resentful glance. “Fuck you.” His gaze moved up and down Fanule’s body. “Which might not be a bad idea if you had a blindfold on.”
Almost imperceptibly, Fanule’s skin felt tighter. A light spangle flared and faded in his groin. “Just get the damned paper, would you? I don’t like hurting people.”
“Not unless they want it, I suspect,” Bentcross mumbled through a smirk. He sauntered over to the aeropod, opened its door, and reached inside. “Here. It’s the one on top.” He tossed a clipboard in Fanule’s direction, its layered papers fluttering.
Fanule scanned it.
Crime: categories 3, 14, 17 (see reverse).
Name: Unknown. Sex: M. Race: prob. BM.
The age, height, weight, and hair- and eye-color details were similar to Gort Woolcraft’s, but there were significant enough differences to make him an unlikely suspect.
Gort had righted his fallen bicycle and now clung to its handlebar grips. Bentcross, leaning against a tree, partook of a cigar he’d apparently pulled from his aeropod. Both men watched Fanule as he flipped the page over and read the back.
According to the account given to police, Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. C. Hightower of 643 Whitestone Way, Albasharle district, had returned from the theater one night to find a man vaguely matching Gort’s description ransacking their house. The burglar had stabbed Mr. Hightower in the lower back before fleeing with jewelry, coins, and other items of value.
“Is this paragraph taken verbatim from the original police report?” Fanule asked Bentcross.
“Yeah. They always are.”
“Did you bother reading it?”
Bentcross spat on the ground. “No. I never do.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t need to know the details of the crimes. I only need to know the details of the criminals.”
Fanule uttered a single, incredulous laugh. He approached the hunter and slapped the clipboard against his chest. “You’re an ass, Bentcross.”
“That’s entirely possible. But what’s your point?”
“There’s no mention in the report of the burglar being a Branded Mongrel. None. Don’t you think a detail like that would’ve leapt out at the victims?”
Bentcross shrugged. “A man tends not to be too observant when there’s a shiv stuck in his ribs. Same holds true for a wife who has to look at it.”
“That’s immaterial,” Fanule countered, raising his voice. “There’s no mention of a Mongrel in the report”—he pointed at the clipboard, now clutched loosely in the hunter’s left hand—“but the wanted man’s race is given as Branded Mongrel. What’s more, if you’d bothered comparing the individual you caught with the information on your blasted catch-sheet, you would’ve realized you had the wrong man.”
Frowning, Bentcross lifted the clipboard and began reading. His eyes repeatedly rose to look at Gort. After a few minutes, he sighed. “And you don’t believe your friend here would pull this kind of caper?” he asked Fanule.
“I don’t believe it’s even remotely possible. He’s a decent man.”
“You’re free to go,” Bentcross grudgingly told Gort.
“Not just yet.” When the Mongrel halted, Fanule said to Bentcross, “Don’t you think an apology is in order?”
Bentcross gaped at both of them. “You must be joking.”
Fanule knew his cool, steady gaze smashed that assumption.
Looking flustered, Bentcross addressed Gort. “I’m sorry, sir. Please forgive me. I’ll exercise more care in the future.”
With a nervous nod, the Mongrel led his bicycle through the woods.
Bentcross raised and lowered his brows. “Little bugger didn’t look convinced.”
“Would you be?”
The hunter didn’t answer. When he seemed on the verge of boarding his craft, Fanule jogged over and grabbed his wrist. “Wait. I have a few more questions.”
Bentcross glanced from his wrist to Fanule’s face. “All right.”
Their eyes met for a beat. Fanule felt another small thrill of temptation. He cursed himself for finding this boor attractive.
“You think I’m shit, don’t you,” Bentcross said.
“More or less. It’s how I view anybody who profits from putting creatures under the Monkey’s Claw.”
Bentcross seemed familiar with the term. “Say that to me when I bring in a child k
iller… Eminence.”
His sneering tone came close to triggering more rage in Fanule, but reason prevailed. Mongrels bristled at blind scorn; why shouldn’t bounty hunters? They had their place in society—Purinton’s rozzers were too busy extorting money from local businesses and favors from prostitutes—so Bentcross had a right to his resentment.
“I only wish,” Fanule explained, “that you never snatched innocent souls, as you nearly did today.”
Bentcross curled in his lips and looked down at his feet. “Believe it or not, Mr. Perfidor, I wish that as well.” He gave a desultory kick to one dusty boot, heel against toe, then to the next.
Fanule cleared his throat. “Do you think the Lord High Mayor’s office and the Enforcement Agency are targeting Mongrels?”
The hunter rubbed his forehead and appeared to give the matter some thought. “I don’t know. There do seem to be more warrants per capita for Taintwell than for Purinton, and the EA has demonstrated a certain zeal in encouraging us to execute those warrants. I’ve always assumed it was because your”—he glanced uneasily at Fanule before looking down again—“your citizenry is somewhat more… lawless.”
He was likely going to say your kind but thought better of it. “We probably are,” Fanule said. “But not in any way that justifies our wholesale imprisonment. Tell me, what happens when you turn in your captives?”
Bentcross finally met Fanule’s gaze. “First I prove it’s a legitimate grab. That means showing the intake sergeant my prisoner as well as the catch-sheet, so he can compare the two. Then I fill out a report—date, time, location, circumstances—then I get paid, sign out, and leave.”
“Has the intake sergeant ever released one of your captives, right then and there?”
“Once. But the wrongdoer had, let’s say, some important relatives.”
The revelation didn’t surprise Fanule, but it did vex him. Leniency for the well connected—how typical of Purintonian justice. “What happens to the prisoners?”
“The usual. Detention and trial. If they’re guilty, they go to a labor camp or Dunwood. The worst of the worst go to the ’Combs. The kids and petty offenders get marked and turned loose.”
