by Frank Tuttle
Its eyes were wide and staring. Its mouth was set in a furious scream.
It was perhaps two long strides from falling upon me.
“She drew this?”
Gertriss nodded. “Look at the bottom.”
I moved my hand.
Across the bottom of the paper, in a row, Buttercup had drawn five faces. The faces were different from the rest of the drawing—whereas the figures above were marvels of economy and skill, the faces were crude, blocky caricatures. Not childish, not innocent. Cruel and harsh and spare.
“I suppose Mama is beside herself.”
Gertriss took the drawing and folded it hurriedly. “You think?” She shoved it back in her purse but kept her hand on the butt of her revolver. “I don’t pretend to understand precisely what Buttercup is, boss, but if that’s not some kind of banshee omen, I’m an Ogre’s wife.”
I grunted. “Darla know about this yet?”
Gertriss shot me a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look.
“Of course she does,” I said. “Mama’s involved. Dammit.”
“Any of that mean anything to you?”
“Some of it.” She opened her mouth to ask, but I shushed her with a look of my own. “The less you know the better, right now. Look. Call off the rescue mission. I’m fine. If any Watchmen ask, I had nothing to do with any warehouses that might have blown up earlier today. I’m following a lead down on the docks. Tell Holder I’ll drop by the Watch house on Candle Street later. Tell Mama to hide the rest of her butcher paper. And tell Darla I’ll be home before midnight and not to worry.”
She frowned but nodded.
“How’d you get Evis mixed up in all this?” she asked. “Don’t bother denying it. You couldn’t have gotten any you-know-what otherwise.”
“He volunteered,” I whispered. “Hell, he practically twisted my arm. Something’s up with him, Gertriss. Might you know anything about that?”
She shook her head. “He’s been on edge lately. Moody. Distracted. Says it’s just business.”
“And of course you’d tell me everything.”
She smiled and raised an eyebrow. “Of course I would, boss. Just like you always tell me.”
“You wound me, junior partner. But fair enough. And thanks for coming looking.”
“Finding you is never hard, boss. I just follow the trail of carnage.”
“Beat it. Don’t let Holder scare you, either. He’s crippled by his own integrity.”
“I hope you’re right.”
She stepped in and hugged me then, fast and hard. Then she was gone, sideways glances and a subtle perfume in her wake.
I feigned a sudden interest in frozen fish long enough to let her hit the street. Then I headed back to the bar, hands in my pockets, whistling a happy tune.
Evis hadn’t moved. But my chair had. The barkeep was wiping his glasses but his face was pale and his hands were shaking.
Seems I wasn’t the only one at our table to enjoy a brief conversation with a business associate.
“An old friend drop around for a bite?” I asked.
I saw his dead white eyes shift behind his dark spectacles.
“Not here,” he said. “Another hour. Then we’ll leave. And talk.”
I put my hat down on the table. Fresh cigars were lit. I took pity on the barman and flipped him a heavy coin.
He caught it mid-flight, but he never took his eyes off the door.
We smoked in silence, while the docks came back to life around us.
It still wasn’t dark outside.
But the sun was dropping fast, and the shadows of the storefronts and bars and whorehouses left wide swaths of the street in deep shadow. We kept to those, and the crowds kept their distance, and after a time Evis broke his silence.
“The House is troubled,” he began by way of preamble. A pair of tipsy working girls waved at us as they passed. One even bared her neck to Evis.
Weed robs them of judgment early.
“I can see that,” I replied. “Troubled at the general condition of Man, or is something specific keeping the House up days?”
“Avalante has no interest in the drug trade,” he said. “Not the trade itself, or its attendant atrocities. We monitor the activity, of course, but we do not intervene.”
I made no mention of blowing up a warehouse earlier, though I was relatively certain that fell under the broad category of intervention.
“House Lethe has, for the last century, conducted and controlled the drug trade here. They profited enormously, of course, with no regard for the consequences. Their abuses had grown so egregious there was talk within the House of making a mild correction.”
“A mild correction in the form of a hole as deep as the High House is tall?”
Another pair of afternoon ladies sashayed past, all giggles and winks.
“But something has changed.”
“Lethe simply ceded their authority,” said Evis. “All at once. Without resistance.”
We stopped to let an Ogre huff and puff past with his manure wagon in tow.
“Did we have anything to do with that?”
“No. Word went out yesterday. I was to be informed in a meeting this afternoon.”
“I don’t understand. Why would they do that? More to the point, why does Avalante care? You wanted House Lethe brought to heel.”
Evis darted through a bright patch of sun, and I joined him in the shadows on the other side.
“We wanted the situation adjusted. Consider this, Markhat. Lethe just walked away from an estimated two million crowns a month in weed revenue alone. Two million crowns.” He turned to face me. “Something convinced the least rational of all the Dark Houses that it was worth twenty-four million crowns a year to simply walk away from the drug trade on the docks.”
I cussed, using words I hadn’t used in years.
“Just so,” said Evis. “And perhaps even worse, Avalante, for all our carefully constructed intelligence networks, doesn’t have the slightest idea what agency made Lethe turn tail and run.”
I repeated my words. With feeling.
“So whose warehouse did we blow up?”
“That,” said Evis, “is the question of the day.”
We walked in silence for a long time, while the sun sank and the shadows stretched.
“Well,” said Evis, at last. “What is done is done.”
“No use crying over exploded storage buildings,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be getting back to Avalante? I can handle things from here.”
Evis chuckled. “Where better for me to be, than at the heart of the mystery?” he said. “We might as well locate your Mr. Chuckles. He may well know things I do not.”
“What are the odds he’s in with the crew that gave Lethe the heave-ho?”
“Nonexistent. Whatever is happening here is the result of an outside agent. We may have missed a few things, but I am certain that none of the day folk tasked with running the trades day-to-day played any role in expelling Lethe.”
“Willing to bet your life on it?”
Evis shrugged. “It seems,” he said, “I already have.”
“I think the Bastion is four blocks due east,” I said. “At least that will put the sun at our backs.”
We turned and made for Chuckles. Evis stuck his hands in his pockets and I hoped he was holding a pair of fancy vampire pistols.
I put my hand on the grip of mine and we plunged deeper into the shadows.
The façade of the Bastion, I recalled, is made from timbers some dimwit hauled all the way home from some nameless garrison along the Western Frontier right after the War ended.
The plan was to turn it into a fancy hotel. When that didn’t pan out, they sold half the big lumber and what was left became a jumble of shops with the old hotel’s bar remaining behind more or less intact and still serving liquor.
We saw the first sign of trouble half a block from the Bastion’s big, black, blood-oak garrison gate doors.
Evis put
his hand on my shoulder and sniffed the air. I waited and watched furtive figures dart out of the building, their hands full of bundles or their arms filled with bottles.
The street was empty. No one entered the Bastion while I watched, but I counted half a dozen people fleeing the place, carrying whatever they could manage and not stopping to retrieve the things they dropped.
Evis cursed.
“We’re too late,” he said.
No Watch whistles blew. People saw us standing there and shuttered their windows and locked their doors.
The last of the looters took off. One had an armload of fancy, red curtains. Another tried to push a silver serving cart down the street but got the wheel caught in a missing cobblestone and turned the whole works over. The man scooped up a single unbroken bottle and ran.
The Bastion’s open doors beckoned.
“Think anyone is still inside?”
Evis listened for another moment.
“I don’t think so. Shall we?”
He produced his pistols. I did the same.
We walked through the doors like we owned the place. I smelled the same stink of blood I’d smelled not too many hours before.
The Bastion was a shambles. Tables were overturned. The polished oak floors were slick with spilled drinks. And blood.
Lots and lots of blood.
Amid the smashed chairs and broken plates and shards of glass lay bodies. Two, four, six, eight—I stopped counting at ten. All bent and broken, necks snapped, heads bashed, limbs bent at unnatural angles. Glistening, wet bones showed here and there.
The walls were festooned with crossbow bolts. Here and there the plaster showed the spider-web patterns of holes and cracks I knew to be the result of gunfire.
“One lives,” said Evis. “Markhat. Attend.”
I picked my way to the rear of the place.
Evis stood a pair of paces before the crumpled figure of a man.
He was still breathing. Barely. Each breath was a ragged, wet gasp. I moved closer and got a good look at his gut and knew he wouldn’t be bothered to make those awful noises much longer.
His elaborate, waxed moustache caught sprays of blood from his nose.
“Don’t,” he managed to say. His eyes were wide and staring. The effort of speaking that single word left him gurgling and bleeding from his mouth. He managed to put his hat between himself and Evis. “Don’t. Vampire. Don’t.”
Evis turned away from him and took a few steps back.
I knelt at his side, snapped my fingers by his nose until he looked at me.
“They call you Chuckles, don’t they?”
“Keep. It. Away.”
“I will. I promise I will.”
Damned if he didn’t try to smile at me.
“Who did this?”
He tried to form a word, nearly choked on blood. I found a white linen dinner napkin on the floor and wiped his mouth as best I could.
“Doctor.”
“We’re fetching one now,” I lied. He’d been eviscerated. All the doctors on the Hill couldn’t give him another two minutes of life. “Who did this?”
His hand moved to his topcoat. He couldn’t move well enough to get it past the buttons. I helped him, and he managed to reach in and pull out a bloody folded paper.
I took it from him. His pupils grew large. His wet, wheezing breaths came shallow and fast.
“Your. Name,” he said, turning his dying eyes on mine. “Name.”
“Markhat,” I said.
“Death Angel,” he managed, with a spurt of blood. “Markhat.”
He gurgled, he shook, and he died.
Evis glided to my side.
“The paper?”
If his paper had been hexed, the hex was obviously spent. I unfolded the paper. It was another old playbill.
On it was a drawing. A man lay dead, his eyes crude Xs, his coiled entrails spilled at his feet.
Below that was a name. Charles Chuckles Witaker. Underneath was a date, noted in Old Kingdom cipher. It took me a second to work it out as today.
And below all that were the same five crude faces Buttercup had drawn below my likeness.
“Angels and Devils,” I said.
Evis hauled me up by my elbow and we hoofed it the hell out of there and we didn’t slow down until we were safe behind Avalante’s impenetrable walls.
Getting back to Avalante was easy.
Going home to hearth and wife was out of the question.
I didn’t need Gertriss to tell me what I already knew, which was that the Watch was parked outside my house waiting to show me the kind of hospitality that comes complete with small, windowless rooms and meals served cold in dirty tin bowls.
Gertriss caught Darla at the dress shop and slipped her a note. Gertriss led the pair of Watchmen assigned to follow Darla on a merry chase that led nowhere, while Darla booked a room in a hotel a stone’s throw from her former employer, the Velvet.
I’d promised to meet with Captain Holder sometime after Curfew, but on the advice of my legal counsel, we sent a detailed report of the day’s festivities to the Watch house on Candle Street instead. The report was accurate, if not entirely complete. We may have neglected to mention explosives, but we did divulge nearly everything else, and we even included a copy of the drawing the unfortunate Chuckles produced right before he died.
Evis had it notarized, festooned with the Avalante seal, and delivered to the Watch with a fruit basket, and thereby confirming his sense of humor is nearly as juvenile as he claims mine to be.
Gertriss helped me sample Evis’s good beer, though I seemed to be the only one enjoying it.
“What a pair of long faces you are,” I observed when the silence in the room became oppressive. “I’m the one on the run from the Watch, remember?”
“The Watch may prove to be the least of our problems,” said Evis. “These faces. They trouble me.”
He’d been staring at the blood-stained drawing since we’d returned. I’d given up on it suddenly divulging any hidden clues.
“Looks like a gang thing,” I said. “Whoever pushed Lethe out of the picture probably uses that as their tag.”
Evis shook his head. “I am familiar with all seven hundred and ninety-six gang symbols in use today. This is not one of them, nor does it conform at all to the customary stylings of such.”
I wasn’t going to say it, but Gertriss did.
“You think it might be arcane? Some kind of wand-waver signature?”
Evis just shrugged. “I’ve sent for Stitches,” he said.
Stitches is Avalante’s new rising star of a sorceress. I’m the only one who knows her other famous name, which is the Corpsemaster. But that was a secret I wasn’t willing to share with Evis, Gertriss, or the Angels themselves, if only for their safety.
“Doesn’t strike me as something a wand-waver would do,” I said. “They don’t mail out warnings. And if they do, they don’t use scraps of old theatre waybills. That smacks of the impecunious working class.”
“I am pleased to know your opinion of my brethren has not changed,” said a voice from inside my head. Its tone was tinged with amusement. “It is good to see you again, Captain Markhat.”
I mopped at the beer I’d spilled. Gertriss hid her laughter behind her hand. Evis just flashed me a toothy, halfdead grin.
“Thank you for coming, Stitches,” he said. “We’d like to show you something. See if you recognize anything about it.”
“Nice bit of sneaking,” I said. “Waste of good beer, though.”
Evis pushed the drawing across his desk. Stitches glided to retrieve it.
Her eyes and mouth were still sewn shut. Her skin was still an icy pallor, touched faintly with blue. Her hands were wraith-thin.
She took the drawing and held it for a long time.
“Neither the drawing, nor the ink, nor the paper itself is imbued with any detectable arcane energies,” she said at last.
“What about the row of faces
at the bottom? Do they have any mystical significance that you know of?” asked Evis.
She put the waybill down on the desk.
“None that springs to mind. There are, of course, ancient texts I can consult.”
“Please do so,” said Evis.
“Context?” she asked.
“Hell if I know,” replied Evis. “Sorry, but we’re in the dark about this. All I know is that the Watch is asking about faces as well.”
Stitches nodded. “I will begin at once. Captains. Miss Hog.”
She simply vanished. The door never opened, never closed.
My mouth was as dry as last year’s cotton. “That’s new,” I said.
“We like to stay ahead of the competition,” said Evis. He stabbed the drawing with a pale white talon. “Thought we were managing, until this.”
I rose. Grumpy halfdead tend to brood, and brooding halfdead tend to be slow to refill empty iceboxes such as the one currently sitting forlorn and bare in the corner.
“Think I’ll check in on Darla,” I said. “Cheer up. I’ll bet Stitches and her ancient texts have this mess cleared up before my first year of prison is complete.”
Evis hissed through his teeth in a long, vampire sigh.
I found my hat and, unlike Stitches, I used the door.
Chapter Seven
It doesn’t take long for married folks to start adopting one another’s habits.
When I’m apprehensive, for instance, I sharpen my knife.
Darla doesn’t carry a wide, old, Army-issue combat knife, but she does have half a dozen of Avalante’s finest revolvers. When I got to our temporary home at the Bear Street Inn, four of Darla’s revolvers were stripped and laid out on the tiny dining table, a fifth was soaking in a can of light machine oil, and her favorite was being lovingly burnished with a clean, felt cloth.
We said our hellos and shared some small talk. She’d already sent for our supper, since we didn’t dare show our faces down in the first-floor restaurant, so we sat on the couch and talked in low voices and waited for the bellhop to come knocking at our door.
I wound up telling her everything. I’d meant to skip past a few events. Blowing up a warehouse, for instance. The kicking in of teeth. Threatening dockside crime bosses.
