by Frank Tuttle
It only took a few heartbeats for the numbness to spread. I stumbled, put my hand down to my gut. It came away sticky and wet and warm.
I hadn’t even felt her cut me.
“Damn,” I said. I felt movement behind me, so I whirled Toadsticker in a wide arc at petite head level. Toadsticker bit, connecting with something solid.
She went down.
I managed three steps toward Darla before my legs just gave up and folded.
“Sorry about the rug,” I heard myself say. “Maybe Mama knows a magic laundry spell.”
The dark room got suddenly darker. I heard, as from a great distance, Darla shout my name. And I saw, dimly, shapes move in the shadows, circling me, wary and silent and in no hurry at all.
I realized I was face-down on the rug, and I pushed myself up, heard the rustling of fancy black gowns.
Darla snatched Toadsticker out of my hand.
And then came the scream.
We all heard it, even the quiet ladies with their perpetual smiles and their shiny bright knives. It was a peculiar sort of scream—one that started out small and distant and faint, but quickly grew into a breathless, ear-piercing howl that, impossibly, managed to sound from a place directly behind you, moving with you if you turned.
I struggled to remember where I’d heard that scream before as the numbness spread to my chest and began to inch and ooze its way up my neck.
The smiling women’s skirts grew still. They no longer walked. A tiny portion of my mind recognized this as a very good thing, though I couldn’t place the significance in context just yet.
Buttercup appeared in front of me, her tiny hands lifted, her small but powerful banshee lungs filling the room with a keening, rising howl that filled every nook and cranny until the volume threatened to make your ears burst and bleed.
Darla moved past us, a tall shadow in the dark. Toadsticker gleamed as she raised him and flashed as she swung.
A small shadow fell, and then another, and another. Buttercup’s howl went up and on and up and on, and it tugged at me as if insisting that I follow.
I lost all feeling in my jaw, in my lips, in my nose. I wasn’t sure I was still breathing, and I wasn’t sure that was important.
Toadsticker rose and Toadsticker fell, and still the shapes didn’t move—didn’t resist or flee, didn’t struggle.
Something poked me right between my eyes.
I blinked, barely felt a second poke and struggled to focus.
It poked me again. A pair of small red eyes, each iris a dancing point of flame, stared into mine.
A tiny hand slapped me, tugged at my ear. I tried to speak, couldn’t, and struggled to keep my eyes open.
The eyes flared and in the brief glow of them I saw a thumb-sized impish face appear. It puckered its thin red lips and it spat into my eyes, something that burned and stung and left me blinded.
Buttercup’s cry went silent. My ears rang. She went to her knees and put her face close to mine.
“Dollies,” she said, her voice as high and cheerful as any child’s.
Darla knelt down beside her. Her cheeks were spattered with blood.
I surprised myself by speaking.
“Any of that yours?”
The feeling in my face flooded back. The numbness fled my chest. The sharp wicked pain of a gash across my ribs made me wince.
I found my legs and put them under me and managed to rise manfully to a crouch.
“Thank you, Mr. Simmons,” I said.
If the imp was anywhere around, he didn’t reply.
“You’re delirious,” said Darla.
I made it to my feet. Buttercup danced and clapped her hands in glee.
“Maybe. Are you hurt? Did they nick you?”
“No. They just stopped moving. I don’t think.” She swallowed hard. “I don’t think they’ll get up again.”
I took Toadsticker gently from her hand.
“We need to go. Right now. Before any more show up.”
“You said the blades were poisoned.”
“They were. But I’m all better now, see?” I took a pair of wobbling steps and picked up my gun out of a pool of blood.
Buttercup vanished from my side and reappeared inside our open front door. She was glowing softly, like a cloud-covered moon.
“Dollies,” she said, her tone suddenly somber. She pointed north.
The numbness was gone. My wound was wide but shallow. I’d need stitches but I judged I’d live long enough to get them.
I joined Buttercup in the ruined door. Lights were going on in windows up and down the street. Here and there, the bolder neighbors peeked out of half-open doors, lanterns or candles in their hands.
“Sorry for the noise, folks,” I shouted. “Hedgehogs. Big ones. Had to put them down. I’d stay inside, if I were you. Think we missed a couple.”
With that, I took banshee in one hand, bride in the other, and we ran until we managed to find a Watchman and summon a carriage and bleed all the way to Avalante.
Chapter Seven
Doctors hovered until I pitched a fit and chased two of them out of the room with the same bedpan they were insisting that I use. Darla helped by sitting in a corner and nearly choking with laughter.
Evis himself appeared a few minutes later, noticeably bereft of bedpans or white-coated doctors.
“Well. I see you’re making yourself popular with the staff. Hello, Mrs. Markhat. Is he always this quick to make friends?”
Darla stood, smiling. If you didn’t know her well enough to tell her real smiles from the manufactured one she showed, she looked not only composed but cheerful.
The bloodstains on her blouse were dry, but large and plain.
“You should see him first thing in the morning. It’s like living with an Ogre.”
Evis laughed without showing his teeth and pulled a chair up close to my bed.
“The good news is they can’t find any trace of poison in your blood.”
“Marvelous. Hear that, Darla? I can die of old age after all.”
“Not so fast. We still don’t know what was on the blade in the first place. Stitches says you’re to stay right there, with a doctor at the door, in case there’s some time-delayed element to the agent we just can’t see.”
I groaned. Darla deflated a little, realizing, I guess, that Stitches had just won her argument for her.
“I’m telling you, Evis, Mr. Simmons spat in my eyes and cured me right there.”
Evis nodded amiably, as I might do in the presence of an old man telling tales of flower-gathering fairies in the bygone days of yore.
“I mentioned that to Stitches,” said Evis. “She muttered something about hallucinogens and psychotropic venoms. “
“So you think I dreamed all that.”
Evis turned his dirty marble eyes toward Darla.
“Did you see anything in the room, aside from your headstrong husband and the, um, intruders?”
She shook her head no. “It was dark. I was busy. I suppose something small could have been sneaking about, but…”
Evis sighed and looked back at me. “Maybe you didn’t get a killing dose. Hell, maybe you were saved by imp expectorant.”
“It’s been that kind of night.”
“Let’s hope it’s all over. By the way. We’re moving you two as soon as Stitches is satisfied you’re out of the woods. You’ll be moving into a stateroom on the Queen.”
“On the boat?”
“Third deck, port side, two doors down from me, across the hall from Stitches. Surrounded by the most potent sorcerers and most skilled soldiers Avalante can field. Safest place I can think of.”
“How far from the saloon?”
“Not far enough,” said Darla. She fixed me with her most unsmiling smile. “What about our house? And Buttercup?”
“When you two go home you’ll find all the damage repaired, all the evidence removed. We’ve even convinced your neighbors the ruckus was just kids with fireworks.”<
br />
“You’ve got the bodies here?”
I started to rise but Evis pushed me back with that cold, small, halfdead hand of his.
“You don’t have to worry about them. They’ve been rendered harmless. Stitches thought it was worth taking a look. She may have been right. Said this batch wasn’t as finished as the other one we saw. Said the maker might have been in a hurry—might have slipped up somehow.”
“Not as finished? What the hell does that mean?”
“You’ll have to ask her. But not tonight. Tonight, you two are to get some rest. Mrs. Markhat—”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, my name is Darla. Just like it was before we married. Darla.”
“Darla, there’ll be a doctor in a chair outside the door all night. Yell if our patient here so much as sneezes. And you.” He waggled a finger at me. “No more brandishing of bedpans, you hear? We may need all the doctors we can get if this thing goes bad.”
I yawned because I couldn’t help it.
Evis stood. “Any sign of Buttercup?”
“Nope. She’s probably dancing atop the Brass Bell or tweaking Captain Holder’s long nose.”
Buttercup had simply vanished from the carriage well before we crossed the Brown River Bridge. Neither Darla nor I was worried. Diminutive she might be, but Buttercup was also a banshee who’d probably been wandering the wilderness all alone before the Old Kingdom started piling up rocks and calling them walls. If any ne’er-do-wells spotted Buttercup and attempted any mischief on her as she headed back to Mama’s—well, the dead wagons would doubtlessly collect what was left come the dawn.
Evis shrugged. “Probably. Look. Get some sleep and try not tear out your stitches. You’re safe here.”
I grunted assent. My belly wound was burning where Avalante’s smiling human doctors had smeared some stinging blue fluid all over the new stitches. My head was pounding, whether as a result of the poison or imp-spit or both or neither I couldn’t say.
Evis aimed a tiny little bow toward Darla and took his leave. She waited until the door was shut and joined me on the bed.
“I like him, you know.”
We scooted and rolled and got tangled in the fancy sheets and finally established a more or less comfortable position with me on my back and Darla on her side facing me.
“He’s a barrel of laughs, that Evis.”
She tweaked my nose gently. “He’s a good friend. And a gentleman. Not the pretend kind. He’s rich but he works hard. Halfdead but he’s got a big heart.”
“He’s a man of paradoxes, all right.”
“You can put that hand right back where it came from, mister. You’re here to recuperate.”
“I find that recuperative.”
“I’ll call for leeches. You know I will.”
I sighed. She smiled in weary victory.
“You know Gertriss is sweet on him, and vice versa.”
“Why does everyone say that like I’m going to be shocked? I was a finder while Evis was in knee-pants and you were learning accounting. I can tell when the wind blows, you know.” I tapped my temple. “Smarts, that’s what I’ve got.”
Darla snuggled closer.
“Gertriss is worried about what you’re going to say.”
“I’m not going to say a damned thing. What she and Evis get up to is their business, none of mine.”
“That’s not really true, darling. She wants your blessing. She needs it. So does Evis, you know.”
“He’s got it and he knows it.”
“Does he?”
“I said it plain and simple. He knows.”
“Be a dear and say it to Gertriss too, won’t you?” I swear she batted her eyes. “For me?”
“I thought we’d established that hands were to stay outside the sheets.”
“Yours, perhaps. Not mine.”
I did sleep.
Eventually.
Morning came, bringing with it the smiles and fresh-scrubbed faces of the Avalante day staff and the grumbled greetings and dark glasses of the Avalante halfdead who worked the day shift.
Darla and I picked scrambled eggs out of the same enormous breakfast plate and speculated just how far underground we were. I’d forgotten to count stair landings on our way down, and Darla had been too busy watching me for signs of imminent demise to even realize we were descending.
Doctors came and poked and prodded and frowned and whispered. I was finally pronounced healthy and whole after the obligatory physician’s lecture on the evils of alcohol and a sedentary lifestyle.
At last, the somber-faced physicians filed out, and I rose from my sickbed, a man ready to face a second helping of breakfast.
Alas, Darla and the Avalante day staff had other plans for me. We were to be moved to the Queen, we were, before the noon.
“Your wife’s clothes and accoutrements, as well as your own garments, are being conveyed to the Queen as we speak,” quoth Mr. Bevins, who was obviously unaware of my high favor within Avalante since he made it clear that no garment I was likely to own was worthy of being incinerated, much less conveyed. “We will be leaving within the hour. I suggest you make yourself ready.”
I gave Darla my famous raised eyebrow questioning glance. “Dear, when did we get accoutrements, and won’t they chase the cat?”
Mr. Bevins inflated. “Good day, sir.”
He had the grace not to slam the door behind him.
Darla found a water closet. Faucets squealed as she bemoaned the state of her hair.
I tiptoed to the door, opened it a crack, and listened.
I heard nothing. The absence of sound was utter and complete. I revised my initial estimate, putting us at least a hundred feet below the morning sun.
Darla wrapped her arms around my shoulders.
“I’ve never even been on a boat,” she said. “Do you think it will have proper bathrooms?”
I shook my head. “Holes in the deck, I imagine. We’ll sleep wrapped in scraps of sail. But it won’t matter since we’ll be exhausted from rowing all day.”
She laughed, her breath warm on the back of my neck.
“You’ve never been on a boat either, have you?”
“Of course I have. I know all about boats. Port, starboard, aft, sinking. We’ll have to fight pirates when we aren’t bailing leaks or trimming the jib. I hope they bring your rain boots. At least then your feet can stay dry.”
“Ha. This is a gambling boat, no? It’ll be a palace with a hull. Surely there will be bathrooms.”
“If not, I’ll commandeer you one. I am a Captain, after all. Which means I can stride manfully across the poop deck and shout out orders to the common seamen.”
She leaned against me and sighed.
“I don’t want to live on a boat, you know. Even if it has proper bathrooms.”
“We’ll be home before you know it, Darla. I promise. We’ll sort all this out, and we’ll go home and put up a new door and get a new rug and live happily ever after.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
I closed the door on the silent hall and we sat on the bed until they came to fetch us.
Darla need not have been concerned about the sophistication of the Queen’s facilities.
The toilets flushed. The his-and-hers lavatories ran with hot and cold water. The bathtub was a marble and copper edifice to the fine art of bathing, complete with scented bath oils, fluffy white towels, and a wall with a recess in which a dozen fat candles were merrily burning. Darla’s make-up and hair articles were already on her vanity, arranged just as they’d been at home.
There were closets—one for us each. Our clothes were there, pressed and hung. All three pairs of my shoes were shined and ready for duty. Toadsticker had been honed and polished, my hats were all hanging on fine silver hooks, and I was more than ready to trade my life as a landlubbing finder for a permanent post here on the raging high seas.
Our room was actually three rooms. There was a small sitting room into
which the suite’s only door opened. That led into the bedroom, and off that was the bathroom—or as Darla called it, ‘my own copper Heaven.’
And it wasn’t just our stateroom awash in polished cherry-wood opulence. Every inch of the Brown River Queen was either gilded in gold or trimmed with hand-carved oak.
There was a lot of Queen to gild, too. She was more than four hundred feet long, from the big red paddle at the back to the blunt nose at her fore, and a hundred feet across her shallow, flat hull. Four decks rose above all that—the first deck being the casino and stage, the next being the staterooms, the next smaller rooms for the middling rich, and finally the top deck with its guards at the stair landings, where the Regent and his retinue would be housed.
We were hustled up to our room without a grand tour. But I’d caught a glimpse of the casino deck, and despite the haphazard presence of ladders and scaffolds and shouting carpenters, I’d been awed.
It was cavernous. The ceilings were high and trimmed out in dark oak. The windows were glass—but stained glass, artfully designed to bathe the entire vast casino deck in a soothing mix of greens and blues.
Four enormous hanging lights, things of crystal and sparkles that must have been forged with a deep and potent sorcery, glittered and shone in the colored daylight. Whether oil or gas or candle, they weren’t lit, but I could imagine that when they were the whole room would take on the same silver glow cast by a bright full moon.
The floor was a dark crimson carpet. Gaming tables and devices, covered by clean white sheets, awaited the eager rush of gamblers and vampires and criminals that was soon to come.
There was a stage at the far end of the place, hidden by blood-red curtains emblazoned with Avalante’s roses-and-lances crest.
Twin staircases, one port and one starboard, graced the aft end of the casino deck. Each swooped up into the dark, and we followed the wide carpeted treads up to the staterooms.
Our room was designated 111 by the shiny brass plate upon the door. Like all the other doors on the hall, ours was flanked by a pair of grinning silver gargoyles who held small but brilliant magelamps in each gnarly little hand. Our door was solid and thick and I judged a half dozen Ogres couldn’t have knocked it down, especially after, once we were inside, Darla or I lowered the ornate but decidedly functional bar across the back.
